site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31917 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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.

11
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What happened to the “Covid hawks?”

When was the last time you thought about Covid-19?

Perhaps you or someone you knew had it recently and had to cancel plans or were sick for a while. So perhaps I’ll reword it - when was the last time you thought about Covid-19 in a truly “pandemic” sense? For instance, when did you last wear a mask? Or express a strong opinion about masks or vaccinations (whether for or against?)

Odds are, you probably haven’t done much if any of that for at least 12 months. Though the WHO hasn’t formally declared an end to the pandemic, and a few changes like increased remote work have proved remarkably sticky, “back to normal” has clearly happened for the vast majority of people.

But just six or so months prior to that, Covid was much more of a live issue. Vaccination mandates were highly contentious and stories like the Canada convoy protests and Novak Djokovic’s deportation from Australia were big news. Lots of people cared about Covid and the reaction to Covid, and at that time it seemed far from inevitable that this would quickly dissipate.

In particular, there used to be a sizeable portion of people, whom I’ll call “Covid hawks”, who were strongly in favour of both formal Covid restrictions as well as being personally Covid cautious, even after vaccines had become widely available. Matthew Yglesias talks about them at length in his January 2022 article “Normal”.

The kinds of people who are mad at David Leonhardt have propounded a worldview in which the truly virtuous are those who do remote work, Zoom with family in other cities, exercise at home on their Peloton, and maybe engage in a little light socializing with friends outdoors during the nice weather. You may be allowed to do other stuff, but the truly correct, conscientious mode of behavior is to abstain or minimize.

Covid hawks were very influential in media, in education, and basically anywhere where left-wing views were predominant (including Reddit and Twitter). I personally spent too much time in 2021 and 2022 arguing against them to a fairly hostile reception - even though my own Covid views were if anything a little more hawkish than Yglesias'.

It seemed quite plausible that Covid hawkishness might persist in the long term. Richard Hanaia wrote an essay in July 2021 called "Are Covid Restrictions the new TSA?", arguing that just as the post-9/11 increases in security remained in place, so too could Covid restrictions. This seemed quite plausible to me at the time, especially as I recall many Covid hawks openly being in favour of this. But though some rules did stick around quite a while longer, they’ve more or less all gone now.

Nowadays, the Covid hawks seem to have mostly just… quietly gone back to normal themselves? Sure, there are a handful of holdouts in places like /r/Coronavirus. But I basically never see Covid discussed anymore - even from people who used to talk about it incessantly. This isn’t just anecdotal - Google trends in the US for example show Coronavirus/Covid search results are currently only about 3% of what they were in January 2022.

What happened?

Did Covid pretty much just “go away”?

There’s some element of this. US Daily Covid deaths are now at a pandemic low (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/) at less than 100 a day (though drops in testing may muddy the waters a bit)

But daily deaths have at various times over the past year exceeded the death count seen at various earlier lulls in the pandemic, without seeing a restoration of anywhere near the same reaction. So it can’t be the whole story.

Did Omicron “break the spell”?

January 2022 was the very peak of the Omicron wave in the US (and most of the world), which also produced the highest recorded daily case count of the whole pandemic. It’s hardly surprising that Covid was a relatively bigger issue then.

But I think Omicron had some important features that helped accelerate the end of “Covid hawks”.

Firstly, because vaccines weren’t very effective at preventing infection, the case for vaccine mandates was much weaker, and most places dropped them fairly promptly in early 2022. This took the wind out of the sails of the anti-vax protest movement, which were major villains/points of contrast for the Covid hawks.

Secondly, because Omicron was so infectious, even many otherwise cautious people still got infected by it. This had a few effects. One, it made the “badge of pride” of being Covid cautious less effective if you still got infected anyway. Secondly, a lot of people would have found the illness to be relatively mild and it may have felt their initial fears feel overblown. Finally, the wave resulted in widespread increased immunity, making people feel more comfortable about going back to normal afterward (partly because of cases going down, and partly because of people who felt immune themselves).

Did Covid caution gradually “go out of fashion”?

If you look again at the Google Trends link above, there was a steep fall as the original Omicron wave receded. By March 2022, with cases in a trough, searches were about a third of what they were at the start of the year. But even as subsequent waves of Omicron subvariants reared their heads, resulting in case numbers sharply increasing (though still remaining well below all-time peaks), it appeared to do little to stem back the gradual decline of search interest. Today, search traffic for coronavirus is about a tenth of what it was in March 2022.

So I think Covid “going out of fashion” has to be considered a major factor. My guess is that an “unraveling” of Covid hawkery as a social movement occurred. A number went “back to normal” after vaccination and others after the first Omicron wave passed, but that still left a sizeable enough group for them to feel solidarity with. But the group faced steady attrition as the rest of the world moved on, probably partly due to pandemic fatigue and partly due to becoming an increasingly isolated minority. Being a vocal Covid hawk was still pretty acceptable in certain “blue tribe” circles in mid-2022, but now in mid-2023 you’d probably get funny looks even from many former Covid hawks if you demanded that mask mandates be brought back.

Conclusion

I think the Omicron wave was a precipitating factor in the demise of “Covid hawks”, but it still took a long time to unravel to the tiny minority it is now.

However, this essay might have given the impression that I think the reactions of “Covid hawks” were always too strong, which isn’t the case at all. I’ve always thought that an individual or society’s response to Covid needed to take a cost-benefit analysis into account, and depending on the circumstances that could justify quite strong reactions (e.g. I generally supported (my home country) New Zealand’s lockdowns and border restrictions, if not necessarily every element of their scope or length). Even today, I think the highly vulnerable should be at least moderately Covid cautious, and even the less vulnerable might want to be selectively Covid cautious leading to an event where it could really suck to get Covid (e.g. if you’re about to climb Mt Everest).

Still, I wouldn’t deny it - I’m still a little sore from being heavily attacked on Reddit and Twitter for daring to suggest that some reactions to Covid may go a little overboard. To see that many of the people who used to insist that masking forever would be no big deal are no longer masking themselves does make a feel more justified in my past positions.

I'm answering twice, but I think the main reason for the rather forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing. It's hard to defend things like closing all schools for a year now that nobody's frightened of Covid any more, so they're whistling nonchalantly and desperately trying to forget it. Nobody influential will try to bring it up again because there's almost certainly public proof that they went all in on it too.

It takes a lot of guts and moral stringency to think back and realise that you panicked and smashed our society to slivers for almost nothing. Very few people, public or private, are capable of that.

forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing

I came here to post "Normies stopped talking about it because the media stopped talking about it", so in that sense I agree entirely. Absent the daily orders of What Current Thing To Support being beamed into their devices 24/7, the Normie does not support it, and so when the media messaging stops, the Covid hawks vanish.

I'll also give a moderate agreement on your reasoning as to why the media stopped. Reminding people about Covid might remind them of a glaring example of how Big Government (and it's Cathedral tentacles in academia, NGOs, media, civil society, experts) fucked up. Which is a line of thought they want to assiduously avoid planting in the proles' heads, so better to just memory-hole the whole experience.

But the Covid hawks are very specifically not the normies. They're the guys who kept the faith long after the normies stopped. The Covid hawks are dissidents, and in some sense have at least considered themselves dissidents for the whole duration of the pandemic (after all, in most Western countries, the measures stopped far short of what the hawks were demanding at various points, and were run down far sooner than the hawks would have preferred.)

I have the same grudging respect for people that all still all-in on Covidism that I do for the farthest fringe religious believers, the guys that take the Koran completely literally. Most people kind of shrugged at Covid policies and halfassedly followed along. They might have been somewhat scared, but still gone along with going out with their friends, or they might have thought the whole thing was silly, but still gone along with masking. Likewise, most people that say they believe a given religion kind-of sort-of follow it, but might fudge a bit around the edges when it comes to literal interpretations or inconveniences like abstinence until marriage. Not the fundamentalists or Covid hawks though! In the year of our Lord 2023, they maintain that if that's the word of Allah, you need to follow it completely and that if Covid justified society-level shutdowns in 2020, the fact that it still exists means that you should at least wear a mask if not avoid all crowds entirely. I think the premises of both of these groups are incredibly incorrect, but I do have to respect the willingness to follow their principles to their logical conclusions.

For the people who are still all-in (at least in the US), it's not really about COVID and it never was. These are the kind of germophobes who wiped everything down with sanitizer and insisted that guests wash their hands when entering their homes long before COVID hit. When certain policies that played into their neuroticism became mainstream for a brief period in response to a specific threat, they latched onto them, and were surprised and appalled that the public abandoned them whenever the threat was over. If COVID were eradicated tomorrow these people wouldn't all of the sudden throw their masks away and stop caring about safety precautions, they'd go back to the germophobes they were in 2019 and argue that there are still plenty of other diseases out there that we should be requiring all these precautions to prevent.

I wouldn't underestimate the commitment of normies. When the messaging was on the side of the true Covid hawks the average person was almost indistinguishable from them.

If the Covid hawks are dissidents they only became dissidents after their support evaporated. Before that they were something else... a dissident is on the outskirts of a tribe, they distinguished themselves by being more fervently tribal than those around them.

Well said, it is truly outrageous how much was justified on such flimsy evidence and outright lies.

I am surprised that right wingers in Florida and Texas haven’t been grandstanding more about being right though.

Florida tried and Texas politics is meaningfully different because local issues- Ken Paxton impeachment, tax issues, and the state-federal showdown over border policy- are sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

But it wasn't for almost nothing. It was the deadliest pandemic in the US in over 100 years. The people who died from it are actually dead. You can argue of course that governments overreacted, but to say that it was for almost nothing is quite a distortion of reality.

Yes, people died. They were already going to die that year or the next anyways. Quite frankly ‘Covid is not actually a major threat unless you’re already dependent on medical intervention to survive or quite close to the end of your natural lifespan’ was obvious from very early on in the pandemic, and even if you assume that Covid deaths would have been ten times higher without mitigation measures(not, I think, a supportable assumption but a reasonable steel man of the face saving lies told by our institutions) the NPI’s did so much damage to the social fabric that it still wouldn’t be worth it.

Yes, lots of old and frail people really did die, but that doesn't actually provide justification for things like shutting down beaches and compulsory masking to walk from the door to the bar. Even if one can imagine measures that would have done something useful, the ones that were implemented weren't it. Whether Covid was worth responding to meaningfully or not, we obviously did not respond meaningfully. I could scarcely come up with a better case study in the field of Something Must Be Done And This Is Something.

The Johns Hopkins meta-analysis estimated that lockdowns and other NPIs likely prevented about 0.2% of Covid deaths i.e. almost nothing. These NPIs were instated in reaction to a real threat, but they accomplished almost nothing.

Fair enough, I assumed that Corvos meant that the pandemic itself was almost nothing but I may have misinterpreted.

Sorry, didn't mean to motte and bailey you. Let me try to be more specific:

  1. Yes, people literally died. But if you compare it to historic death rates, it looks more like a blip than an explosion. I'm having great difficulty finding a graph that puts mortality from pre-2020 and post-2020 on the same graph but from https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/death-rate it looks like a return to 2005 era death rates at worst. Rather than not thinking that old people's lives have any value,* I'm saying that for many of them it was just a switch in what gets written on the death certificate. Being the deadliest pandemic for 100 years says more about the lack of danger of pandemics in modern times than it does Covid. Without the media furore, I'm not sure people would have even noticed.

  2. The lockdowns don't seem to have worked. Even staying purely in the realm of preventing deaths, in the UK it seems that more people have died due to lockdown giving the NHS a death blow than due to Covid:

https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2023/june/100000-excess-deaths-cardiovascular-disease https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/highest-uk-weekly-death-toll-nhs-ae-waiting-times-2023-lk769d3cq https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/29/disastrous-legacy-left-lockdown-non-covid-excess-deaths-overtake/

TL;DR: the deaths from coronavirus are a mild statistical irregularity that I feel no emotional valence towards, and the lockdown either didn't help or was actively counterproductive. Thus, "for almost nothing".

*I am actually willing to bite the bullet and say that to a certain extent "old and immuno-compromised people losing some years of life is a nothingburger" but I don't think I really have to in this case.

Yes, people literally died. But if you compare it to historic death rates, it looks more like a blip than an explosion. I'm having great difficulty finding a graph that puts mortality from pre-2020 and post-2020 on the same graph but from https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/death-rate it looks like a return to 2005 era death rates at worst.

I don't think that's right, from the top of the page:

NOTE: All death rate data after 2019 are United Nations projections and therefore DO NOT include any impacts from COVID-19.

Bugger. Thank you. In all honestly, either it just takes ages to gather this data or something a bit fishy is going on. Can anyone find a merged graph? Or does Covid just blow everything else out of the water?

The age-adjusted death rate in the US in 2020 was about the same as the death rate in 2009. Unadjusted, it was about the same as the death rate in 1946, I believe. Almost nothing.

It was a very deadly pandemic for very old people. It is sad they died, and especially that many died alone due to horrible/cruel hospital policies. But this was not a particularly deadly pandemic for younger adults.

Look at this age stratification https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-total-covid-deaths-by-age-group/

COVID really was basically fake. Average loss in life was like 5 years. Only person I knew who died from COVID hadn’t been out of bed in a decade.

If I had to choose between COVID was “real” or “fake” well fake seems far more accurate.

It really depends on what you value. I mean, I understand why some people on this site get more upset by a Confederate general's statue being removed or by some rage-bait that a wokeoid attention seeker with 100 followers writes on Twitter than they get upset by a disease that killed several million people, because I understand that different people value different things over others and have different notions of the possible consequences of events. There are legitimate good arguments in favor of valuing all these things differently in different ways.

But it is exasperating to argue with people who propose the bailey of "Covid is fake, just a cold, and doesn't matter at all" and then retreat the motte of "well it was mostly old people who died". Some people don't think that old and immuno-compromised people losing some years of life is a nothingburger. Some do, I get that. But let's all at least get on the same page and say no, it is not "basically fake". It is not fake at all and saying "fake seems far more accurate" is a rather bad faith use of the words, in the sense that you would not accept a similar use of language to defend a position that you dislike.

I value math. I’m not getting into a what you value thing unless you can make a math argument.

Fair enough, you of course not have to get into a discussion of values if you do not want to, but let me see where you disagree with me here...

  1. Some number of people died from covid. You seem to agree with this.

  2. A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued. Do you agree with this?

If you agree with both, then we are already basically just discussing values, basically the value of saving some life-years as opposed to the value of other things.

The thing is, we usually think in terms of died / didn’t die, and you’re using those terms We talk about things like “saving lives” when the literal autistic meaning would be “delaying death”. Which is why we talk about life-years. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here but please bear with me.

Problem is, the dichotomy makes sense for a young person. The difference between dying at 20 and at 90 is a big difference, so big that we can think about it in terms of “life or death”. But in the case of someone who’s 90 and bedridden, it becomes increasingly absurd. A big part of the feeling of fakeness came about because authorities used very strong rhetoric about saving lives to describe protecting people who were clearly at death’s door. Nobody was interested in debating the value of saving life-years.

A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued.

Possibly. Some more stringent anti-Covid measures may have prevented Covid deaths. Some more stringent ones probably fall under security theatre (they never closed the beaches where I live, but there were Western jurisdictions where beaches were closed: I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that closing beaches prevented so much as a single Covid death). And, obviously, some more stringent anti-Covid measures may have succeeded in the narrow goal of preventing Covid deaths but caused more deaths through second-order effects, or otherwise failed to pass a cost-benefit analysis.

(2) seems potentially false to me. We needed to reach herd immunity via infection so there is no evidence that lockdown measures saved any lives.

Add in deaths from lockdowns like deaths of despair and they probably costs lives.

I check in on the branch covidians at places like ZeroCovidCommunity from time to time, but my emotions towards them have softened over time from disgust to pity. Seems a bunch of people have been well and truly broken by all the fearmongering going around during the lockdowns etc. At this point I basically consider them victims of government policy.

Occasionally I still see people masking in public and I always side-eye them. But again, it's more a feeling of pity than anything else.

I guess that now their faction is out of power and not actively trying to degrade my life, I don't really bear any hostility to them... but if they started gaining power again I'd probably revert to hate.

I check in on the branch covidians at places like ZeroCovidCommunity from time to time, but my emotions towards them have softened over time from disgust to pity.

I guess that now their faction is out of power and not actively trying to degrade my life, I don't really bear any hostility to them... but if they started gaining power again I'd probably revert to hate.

The people in those spaces are not the same people you were disgusted with three years ago. Be careful not to succumb to outgroup homogeneity bias. The people who still take Covid seriously in July 2023 are in many ways kindred spirits to those who were done taking Covid seriously in July 2020; they applied their own reasoning to the problem and came to a conclusion that, right or wrong, they'll cleave to whatever society says. Wearing a mask and social distancing is low status, where before it was high status. Covid Hawks of current year are admirable even though imo they're wrong.

By contrast, some of the people occupying the same space in 2020 were (a) parroting high status positions (b) looking for an excuse to hate the outgroup (c) looking for an excuse to exercise petty authority (d) authentically responding in fear to a perceived crisis by looking for a witch to burn or Jewish quarter to loot. Now that those groups have moved on to something else, they've left the principled core of the pro-lockdown movement behind.

I think Covid hawks were a creation of the hype machine. The searches don’t go up and down based on variants, but media coverage. The media basically dropped all COVID coverage around the time of the Russian invasion when the hype machine went from coverage of COVID related stories (new variant, mask/vaccine) to Plucky Ukraine with a guy who looks like Hawkeye. Instead of the signal being masks and telling everyone you never leave the house, it became Ukrainian flags and being obnoxious about the pronunciation of Kiev as Kyiv.

But to my mind, it was always a creation of media. Had the media not covered the story, it wasn’t much. It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus. Had it not come with death-tickers and infection-tickers on the nightly news, breathless coverage of new variants, and endless advice about whether given activities were “safe” to do, people would never have cared in the first place. Had this happened in 1983, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hysteria— in large measure because we didn’t have the possibility of sending millions of office workers home, and didn’t have online shopping. The hype pushed billions into to coffers of Amazon, Walmart, Doordash, and instacart simply by virtue of making people afraid to leave the house.

It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus.

True, but at the same time, the flu can be nasty itself. Three people in my immediate family got (Omicron, I think) Covid: me - it affected my breathing; one sibling - nothing much apart from flu-like symptoms; another sibling - constant vomiting to the point of fainting and dehydration.

So it had different effects on different people, and while most probably did get away with nothing worse than 'a bad flu', there were also deaths from it. I think the authorities were unsure how to handle it, and veered between too optimistic (it'll burn through like seasonal flu) to too controlling (everyone in your room and no going anywhere for any reason). The latter pissed off people, especially when the authorities were merrily driving around the country and having unmasked parties for their five hundred closest friends while ordinary people couldn't even go visit sick grandma.

Hindsight is easy. If they had gone easy, there would be criticism that they should have instituted lockdowns and that would have stopped it early. If they didn't mandate vaccines, ditto. We have people saying the vaccines killed people, and I'm sure in the opposite case we'd have people saying lack of vaccines killed people. Whatever was done or not done, someone would say "they should have done this/not done this".

It's hard to handle a global pandemic. I think we need a reminder from time to time that Nature, for all our progress and prowess, can still wallop us around.

Had this happened in 1983, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hysteria

Speaking of 1983 - remember AIDS?

A 1981 report by what is now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes a rare form of pneumonia that is later identified as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. It is the most advanced stage of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

I sorta kinda remember some hysteria around it back then? And it's still a pandemic, but the West has not seen the same continuing effects as the rest of the world due to retrovirals. If we still didn't have what is in effect a HIV vaccine, things might be very different. There were travel restrictions, among other measures, implemented in the USA and we still get political traction out of "it was a genocide" for the gay community around how it was treated or not treated back then:

During the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, LGBTQ+ communities were further stigmatized as they became the focus of mass hysteria, suffered isolation and marginalization, and were targeted with extreme acts of violence in the United States. One of the best known works on the history of HIV/AIDS is the 1987 book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts, which contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to spread further and infect hundreds of thousands more. This resulted in the formation of ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) by Larry Kramer. Galvanized by the U.S. federal government's inactivity, the movement led by AIDS activists to gain funding for AIDS research, which on a per-patient basis out-paced funding for more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease, was used as a model for future lobbying for health research funding.

...Publicity campaigns were started in attempts to counter the incorrect and often vitriolic perception of AIDS as a "gay plague". These included the Ryan White case, red ribbon campaigns, celebrity dinners, the 1993 film version of And the Band Played On, sex education programs in schools, and television advertisements. Announcements by various celebrities that they had contracted HIV (including actor Rock Hudson, basketball star Magic Johnson, tennis player Arthur Ashe and singer Freddie Mercury) were significant in arousing media attention and making the general public aware of the dangers of the disease to people of all sexual orientations.

...AIDS was met with great fear and concern by the nation, much like any other epidemic, and those who were primarily affected were homosexuals, African-Americans, Latinos, and intravenous drug users. The general thought of the population was to create distance and establish boundaries from these people, and some doctors were not immune from such impulses. During the epidemic, doctors began to not treat AIDS patients, not only to create distance from these groups of people, but also because they were afraid to contract the disease themselves.

Because the mechanism of transmission wasn't known, there was fear and panic about getting it merely from physical contact with the infected, or contact with things the infected had had contact with. If masking up had been recommended back in the 80s you bet people would have done it, and been vocal about calling for others to do it, as well as the hand sanitisers etc. approach to everything. Keep 2m distance in public spaces between yourself and another person in case they're infected and neither of you know it? Would have been happily adopted.

AIDS was, up until we had treatments universally fatal, its transmisión mechanism and rate were unknown. If you got AIDS, you were going to die, and until we had a good idea of how it spread, people were afraid of it because they knew you died from it, and they thought casual contact spread it.

Also to point out the government response to the public in the AIDS crisis was to calm people’s fears. They very importantly didn’t hype aids. Fauci was a key player in AIDS. He didn’t go on TV warning people not to go outside because there was a scary virus, the hover was telling people that those with AIDS were not to be shunned and avoided.

This is a completely different situation than a virus with maybe a 1% chance of killing you if you were over 65, or had known serious health issues. For 90% of us, this difference between COVID and the flu was first of all the hype, and secondly the government response. We had the data — by march 2020 we knew enough to get a reasonable grasp of the death rate.

The government’s response to this virus is the opposite. Fear. Telling people that if they went outside they could catch COVID, that refusing to take the vaccination was evil. Forcing masks on people. Forcing every place that might be open to the public to either enforce masks and limit occupancy or close entirely.

which contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to spread further and infect hundreds of thousands more

This is rather curious if you think about it a bit. I'm not sure exactly what we knew at the time, but knowing what we know now and what we did about Covid, the most effective thing that we could have done at the time to stop AIDS would have been to double-down on homophobia. Aggressively bust up gay clubs and meeting spots where the most promiscuous gay men would go to have sex with multiple strangers on a regular basis, shut down any mailing lists, newsletters, etc that were effectively used for the same, significant prison time for the worst offenders, etc. (Actually, maybe it's not such a great idea to lock up the most promiscuous gay men who might have AIDS in a prison with a bunch of other men... maybe you'd need a AIDS-only prison for them, then who cares if the end up spending all day humping each other, they've all got AIDS already anyways)

Last year I was in a pub bathroom and there was a sign hanging up giving advice for gay men on how to avoid monkeypox, a disease which disproportionately affects gay men. It was full of cheerfully unambitious and undemanding suggestions like "consider using condoms" and "consider only having sex with a small social circle" (as opposed to "every willing participant you come into contact with", presumably). Nowhere did it suggest that gay men should always use condoms, or avoid having casual sex completely for their own protection until a monkeypox vaccine had been rolled out - those demands would be far too onerous to make, apparently.

It's interesting to me that you can shut down every nightclub and bar in the country (including gay bars) for months at a time in hopes of preventing the transmission of a disease (a disease which disproportionately affects people who are so old and sick that they haven't set foot in a bar or nightclub for years, but whatever) - but the idea of temporarily shutting down gay clubs to prevent the transmission of a disease which disproportionately affects gay men (thereby protecting them from serious illness) is absolutely unthinkable. In fact I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that a public official who proposed this exact policy with this exact rationale would be accused of committing a genocide against LGBT people by denying them (even temporarily) a safe space. (How "safe" is a space exactly if going there makes you far more likely to contract an infectious disease than you would otherwise?)

The selection process for which policies sit inside the Overton window seems so fickle and arbitrary.

The selection process for which policies sit inside the Overton window seems so fickle and arbitrary.

If you think so, you probably haven't discovered the actual criteria.

Note that I said "seems".

I mean, locking them up and saying ‘they’re in prison for spreading a deadly disease by having gay sex constantly’ is a great way to get them murdered in prison.

Comments like these are why I come to this website.

in large measure because we didn’t have the possibility of sending millions of office workers home, and didn’t have online shopping.

And because the obesity rates in first world nations were a fraction of what they currently are, and there weren't half as many old people.

But to my mind, it was always a creation of media. Had the media not covered the story, it wasn’t much. It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus. Had it not come with death-tickers and infection-tickers on the nightly news, breathless coverage of new variants, and endless advice about whether given activities were “safe” to do, people would never have cared in the first place.

Yes and the same is true for many things. From our local vantage point we have a hard time comparing anything that is rare. Car accidents, serial killers, HIV, liver disease -- how many people do you personally know who died from any of these? Just because I don't know anyone who has died in a car accident (let alone anyone close), that doesn't mean campaigns to get people to buckle their seatbelts were just fearmongering.

No comment on whether Covid in particular was fearmongering, but "people wouldn't have cared without the media/tickers" proves too much.

Well, we have a hard time determining relevance and rare comparisons. And I think the media and governments use that quite often to manipulate public opinion. We have a hard time figuring out what really is important and what isn’t. Is Ukraine important to people? Will your life be affected one way or another by the war? And as such why is it something that people spend a lot of time on? Or the Presidential races — has the president ever actually changed anyone’s life? We are told what to care about by the media spotlight, and the vast majority of it really doesn’t matter— or at least not nearly in proportion to the amount of coverage that those stories get.

And the death-tickers were exactly that, because they told you very little about those who were dying, and since you could die weeks after getting a positive test, it was counting current cases. and deaths of people who got sick weeks ago. The other thing left out was just how over and above the testing went. We tested everybody for COVID and used very sensitive tests. Compare that to flu testing where you only test those with pretty severe symptoms. And that’s the point, it was shoved in everyone’s face every single day to make sure that everyone was thinking about the new plague all the time. That was the entire purpose of the ticker. I have no problem with safety campaigns, I think seatbelt campaigns are good, but again, they don’t have a 24/7 ticker of car accident deaths to get people to wear them.

has the president ever actually changed anyone’s life?

yes

If you claim otherwise: are you limiting this claim to USA? effects of USA presidents in USA? last N years? to personal decisions without considering say effects of nomination to the upper legislature of USA aka constitutional court? effects on large part of population, not just "anyone"?

Will your life be affected one way or another by the war?

yes (and for people in USA it also applies, effects on power market and indirect effect of wheat prices alone ensured this)

Yeah, for the vast majority of people it was a nothingburger but that doesn't mean that it was just the flu. It was 10 times more deadly than the flu.

One of the aspects of the COVID situation I find most disturbing was the way decision makers as a class professed to reject the concept of a cost benefit analysis as a way to weigh potential actions. However, looking at their behavior, it's clear that almost nobody actually eschewed cost benefit analysis. (Almost: there's a famous Seattle bartender who drove his formerly renowned Wallingford bar out of business because he refused to give up COVID mask protocols after everyone else had moved on.) It was illuminating to see mass confabulation of reasoning processes and ret-conning of decision making procedures.

Ever spend time with someone who doesn't have a sense of inter-temporal consistency in analyzing his own behavior? One day, he'll be in favor of X, the next ~X, and then X again, all enthusiastically, and usually in absolute denial of having ever felt differently. If you present them with incontrovertible evidence of their having changed positions, they'll change the subject, talk over you, leave the room, and so literally anything except address the substance of what you've said. These people always have some kind of narrative that justifies (if only to themselves) their current feelings. That their narrative might make no scientific or factual or tactical sense doesn't faze them: they have a narrative, and it's enough to quell the background anxiety they must otherwise feel all the time about the wisdom of their actions.

I don't think these people are lying --- not exactly: their brains are merely censoring anything anything that interferes with weaving a story in which their present situation is consistent with their self image. They literally can't sense contrary data: their neural "operating system" filters it out at a low level and reacts to it with a fight or flight response. Imagine Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Everyone has some element of this duplicity in them. When low IQ people behave this way, it's annoying. When high IQ people behave this way, it's dangerous. What's fascinating about COVID is that the situation elicited this behavior from essentially the entire leadership structure of society. What prompted it was of course fear --- first of the virus, then of ostracism. It makes me wonder whether the people who behave the way I describe above do so because deep down they're deathly afraid of something they can't articulate. It's sad.

I think most people aren’t taught to be consistent or to actually think. In the American public school system, unless you’re getting your critical thinking skills elsewhere, you’ll not really get them.

Part of it is that it’s hard to teach at scale; you need to spend time taking apart a text, time to teach (and practice) logic, and time to grade the essays that result. There are simply no real shortcuts to teaching logical, critical thinking. You have to teach textual analysis, you have to teach logic, you have to teach empirical thinking, and you have to teach data analysis. This is further complicated by poor literacy and numeracy in public schools— kids cannot read or do math well enough to learn logic on top of the critical reading and data analysis that they can’t do either.

The other problem is that logical thinkers are exceptionally hard to manipulate. If you know statistics, then you have a much better grasp of risk and thus become much harder to scare into compliance. If you can critically reason, you’ll look into multiple viewpoints, analyze them, and make a decision about the issue. On the other hand, someone lacking those skills will be forced to go with cruder methods like popularity of media attention, or their perceived risk (based mostly on how scary something feels).

Most American schools like to say they teach logic and critical thinking, but they can’t and don’t. They need to pretend they are, because it’s a big educational buzz phrase that employers say they want (up until the person questions the boss) and the political class say they want (up until the public starts to question the favored doctrines). But nobody really wants to create critical thinkers, and anyway, it’s hard. So, instead they go with stupid worksheets that list the canonical fallacies, tell kids to trust mainstream sources and government sources, and then tell them that passing a multiple choice test on these concepts makes them capable of thinking clearly. People are then stuck using whatever TV tells them the science says, and what the authorities tell them to do.

Imagine Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire".

Haven't read it, could you explain the analogy?

When was the last time you thought about Covid-19?

Yesterday. At a rate of about once every day or so.

I don't think about the virus.

I think about the economic turmoil left behind as a result of our reaction to it. Whenever I see or think of monetary/employment woes that are mine or someone else's, I just can't help but think of the counterfactual world where we did not shut down our economies or parts of it for months on end for a 2-year stretch.

I think of the social decay as well. The fact I had to miss 1.5 years of college, just when I started making friends.

Surely both of these things added up, convoluted over millions of people had a loss greater than what numbers could show? Not even counting opportunity costs.

Post covid it feels like Something is Not Right.

The fact I had to miss 1.5 years of college, just when I started making friends.

COVID was a godsend to many students in interesting ways. There’s more than a few people I’ve met, for whom their institution’s response to the lockdown might have been the only reason they were able to graduate. It’ll be interesting to see the reverberating effects of this, 10-20 years down the road.

It's put me firmly in the upper middle class. Let me hold down a job and go to school at the same time after doing all the night/accelerated shit I could at CC.

On that note, California's guaranteed transfers from certain certified CCs to any 4 year if you have a high GPA is fucking incredible and should be the standard everywhere. Got my degree for about 6k before aid.

Interesting. It’d be curious to know if you got lucky by circumstance or just know the system much better than I do. My experience with the California Higher Education system had been nothing short of a nightmare on all fronts.

It's hard for me to imagine that. My experience at 3 institutions has been arriving at the registrars office and saying "Hey, I know it says that I have to do X but instead of that, what if I didn't have to?" and them saying "Lol sure go for it".

It's been all wins for me; but I was in the sweet spot of making just enough on the books money to qualify for everything, but not so much as to make me have to pay in cash as it were.

Also I am just a charming little sonofabitch who mounted a polite harassment campaign on the offices of everyone involved. Basically, there is no reason to ever not pair an email with a phone call.

I got them to accept 12-16 extra units just by talking to people long enough enough to let them know I wasn't gonna stop while keeping the manners at 100%.

EDIT: I had that soom ah cum loudly GPA though, I don't know if it works without both.

The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.

It's no longer verboten to criticise the lockdowns, as it was for years. I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent, but the whole population could be placed under house arrest on a whim, but there you go.

Realistically, there's not going to be a huge revelation. It's just going to quietly fade away, at best they'll be generally seen as a mildly bad response, and we'll forget all about it.

+1 for my general belief that the lockdowns were motivated more by panic, and monkey-see-monkey-do-ing China, than any actually coherent policy.

I disagree. All coverage I see of it, excluding The Telegraph, is framed with the assumption that 200K people died and this is an utterly horrific failure of the government and not an inevitability of a nation state becoming fat and old. I look at all the headline images that journalists choose to run and I Cannot Help But Notice that most of those wearing placards or holding up pictures of the deceased are old people lamenting even older people.

I fear the response to the pandemic has been normalised: when something like this happens again, we will shut down schools and places of free association, we will usher everyone inside their homes to look at screens all day, and we will demonise anyone pointing out the utter disaster of this policy. The operating policy of the country is determined by what is best for the all powerful owner occupier class and the national religion.

I fear the response to the pandemic has been normalised: when something like this happens again, we will shut down schools and places of free association, we will usher everyone inside their homes to look at screens all day, and we will demonise anyone pointing out the utter disaster of this policy.

This is exactly my fear, and why I get so angry when I'm talking about the insanity of lockdowns and the response is "lockdowns are over, you got what you wanted, why are you so mad?" I'll only have "got what I wanted" when the average person and average politician is definitively saying Never Again.

The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.

Really? I had heard that they were pushing heavily for "the lockdowns would have worked, but the selfish Tories delayed for a crucial two weeks because they were more worried about the economy than dying citizens. Next time we have to be ready to lock down immediately".

Definitely the initial phase was lots of crying families and pointed questions about pandemic readiness.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/21/covid-inquiry-politicians-matt-hancock-george-osborne https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66223172

FWIW, Germany had a similar analysis done recently, and the results were fairly self-congratulatory for having done a good job, especially with the social distancing it seems, and only a cheeky little addendum suggesting that future measures should consider taking psychological effects into account.

Source: Heard it on the radio.

This is probably a case of Bureaucrats Cannot Be Wrong. That mentality is a troubling thing to be revealed because most prior cases of ten gorillion dead can be traced back to Bureaucrats Cannot Be Wrong.

I wish my arms were so long and flexible that I could pat myself on the back like that.

I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent

It sounds like you think the vaccine trials could have gone faster by doing challenge trials? I'm not sure that's true, but even if we could have gotten the vaccines approved faster, I'm not sure that would have sped up the rollout much: for several months after approval, they were hard to get because there just weren't enough doses manufactured (first doses in around December 2020, took until May or June to really get everyone access (so by then the prioritized high-risk groups had gotten access); and that was with throwing money at ramping up manufacturing before approval). Maybe there was some way to throw even more money at manufacturing them faster, but my understanding is that really wasn't the case since there were supply chain issues like suddenly needing a lot of specialized machines for vaccine manufacturing, and ramping all of that up could only happen so fast.

And that's not even accounting for the potential absolute disaster of rolling a vaccine out to everyone that didn't actually work, or worse, actually was dangerous, which, in addition to the first-order effects, could have super-charged the anti-vaccine movement.

I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up

I thought the vaccines were developed and approved really quickly?

They were developed very quickly--I believe the first ones in January of 2020. They were approved "quickly" in the sense that a new medicine getting approved in less than a year would be unheard of in normal situations. They were not approved quickly in the sense that quickly by FDA standards is still glacially slow by any reasonable person standards. Also, the testing process was delayed--they were allowed to do phase 2 and phase 3 trials at the same time, IIRC, but those trials took a lot of time because most people weren't getting covid in the course of a month and you need a lot of people in the control group to get COVID in order to have enough data. This could have been worked around with challenge trials, which people even volunteered for, but we can't have that. People might get hurt!

Edit: Since I'm being sarcastic, I should say that manufacturing might have slowed down the process of getting vaccines out anyway. But even with a small number of doses you could prevent a lot of deaths by vaccinating old people and other at-risk groups, which is what we did, so I would guess challenge trials still end up saving lives on net.

Counter-argument: if you roll out a vaccine to the entire population without waiting long enough to see if there are delayed side effects, you could do a LOT of damage.

Probably not as much damage as, you know, the COVID pandemic. The null action also costs millions of lives and trillions of dollars!

We roll out the vaccine to 95% of the population. Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile. Whoops. Civilisational collapse.

Any attempt to roll out a new type of medicine at a civilisational scale should be done extremely carefully. Coronaviruses are to some extent a known factor and are very unlikely to have that level of effect - the mRNA vaccines were very likely to be safe (and mostly were) but it was an entirely new mechanism for messing with the immune system and in my opinion you shouldn't do that for 95% of the population without being very very sure what happens.

Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile.

That's still a good deal for over-65s! You could have rolled it out to all of them and still nearly eliminated the pandemic death toll. That's my whole point - sure, it wasn't worth rolling out an experimental vaccine to everyone at once, but it was obviously worth it for the most vulnerable.

Oh, I agree completely! I argued the same thing elsewhere on the thread.

Covid might also have delayed unknown side effects, so by the exact same logic delaying them could do a lot of damage.

It could. But when I say “a LOT of damage”, I mean the very small chance of rolling out thalidomide to 95% of the population. Covid was, fundamentally, a really bad influenza virus - in my opinion the space of worst-case side effects was much more constrained than that of bad medicine.

(What I would actually have done is a very accelerated rollout for the very elderly who had most to lose and then a more delayed rollout for everyone else.)

What I would actually have done is a very accelerated rollout for the very elderly who had most to lose and then a more delayed rollout for everyone else.

The thing is, if you don't imagine that anything permissible must be mandatory, then you don't have to worry about making those decisions! Instead, you can put the information out there, including the appropriate statements about risk/uncertainty, then you can make it permissible, and your job here is done! People who have the most to lose, be it because they're elderly or because their livelihood depends on not being locked down, or any number of reasons that you haven't even thought of, can just make their own choice about how worth the risk it is! You don't even have to worry yourself to try to come up with a list of reasons why someone might choose to take it or not take it. They'll come up with that list for you, in a beautiful, distributed fashion!

Will some people make the "wrong" choice? Probably! But in the case where you're the one making the choices for everyone, will you sometimes make the "wrong" choice for some people? Probably! Why should society think that your choices for them are better than their own?

if you don't imagine that anything permissible must be mandatory, then you don't have to worry about making those decisions!

It’s a good point, although you’re attributing opinions to me that I don’t hold. I was never in favour of mandatory vaccination, at least not for the new Covid vaccines. There’s a spectrum of action roughly along the lines of:

  • Putting the information out there
  • Advertising heavily
  • An opt-out vaccination program
  • A mandatory vaccination program

Realistically a lot of old people are pretty out of touch (I had a family member of the appropriate age at the time) and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a doctor come and say, “I would like to give you this vaccine, are you okay with that.” Which is probably what I would have done in this case.

More comments

Again, I don't see why any argument that is fundamentally based on uncertainty would favor delaying the vaccine. Yes, it's a bad flu for many healthy people in the short term, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have long-term effects. Getting the vaccine was, at worst, 1 day of flu symptoms for most people, too, but you don't seem to think that means that covid has some unknown long-term risk. There are viruses (like rabies) which hang out in people for a long time with no apparent symptoms but are extremely dangerous. And the whole point of a vaccine is to be similar to the disease it prevents.

(Also, I feel like I should point out that thalidomide is a very important medicine which is only really bad if you give it to pregnant women, which means that you could give it to well over 95% of the population and not have many big problems).

Really quickly by the criminally murderously slow standards of medicine, yes. But they were developed in January 2020 and took most of a year to be rolled out, while the bodies continued to mount up in the meantime, for "safety". Safety from the illness they prevent just doesn't appear on the balance sheet.

You should have been able to volunteer to take the risk of an untested vaccine in January, after the "well it doesn't kill monkeys" stage - if you're 85 that's a good idea! We could have had mountains of human data fast at very low expected risk, spun up vaccine distribution months earlier (the insanity surrounding that is a whole other rant) and nipped the whole thing in the bud.

Once you have mRNA vaccine synthesis, having a pandemic at all is a fucking embarrassment for the human race.

When was the last time you thought about Covid-19?

Yesterday, but that's only because it's early in the morning and my wife is still asleep. I suppose it's not exactly Covid-19 I'm thinking about, because I don't care about the virus outside of it being somewhat interesting what its origins are. My state legislature has proposed a rule to prevent public health agencies from closing places of worship in the event of an emergency, and my complain about this is that I don't think we need to single out religious institutions - this power needs to be explicitly removed from public health agencies across the board. Before Covid, I would have said that such a power isn't likely to be used outside of a genuine emergency and that the experts are smart enough and competent enough to be judicious; after Covid, I'd say that they've demonstrated that they're incompetent and will abuse this power for inscrutable reasons. They can't be trusted, so the risk-benefit of allowing them vast powers to ban various forms of commerce and gathering can't be trusted.

I also think about what was done from a perspective of the lasting damage that was done to the pricing of goods, services, and housing. I also still see paranoid neurotics walking around with masks on and occasionally even people driving alone with masks on. I despise these people, but I also see them as victims of regime misinformation.

So, yeah, I still think it and I think it's pretty weird that other people were able to just mentally let it go and act like it was pretty scary, but we got through it together and it's all good now.

Not all measures were removed in all countries at the same time. In the UK, the restrictions were 99% gone by February, but many places in the anglosphere or adjacent continued until the late year.

Personally, I think the following things contributed to society's funny amnesia moment:

  • The length of the pandemic. It had gone on for nearly 2 years, and as time went on the average person gradually stopped being as afraid.

  • Non-terrible vaccines had been administered into a majority of 50+ individuals in WEIRD anglospheric nations, which are the only countries that matter. At this point, much of the functional threat of the virus has been eliminated.

  • The increasing number of leaks that lawmakers, particularly those at the very top, were throwing racous lockdown parties while everyone else was being denied freedom of association. In the UK, partygate rendered any further restrictions politically difficult for the government to implement.

  • The timing of the Ukraine war. Socially, it immediately supplanted COVID as the Big Thing Everyone Cares about and governments were no longer rewarded for spending vast amounts of state resource on it. Politically, governments had to rapidly change their priorities to account for the war and its knock on effects.

I’d argue the dying out of Covid fanatics was a mix of quite a few factors:

  • As you discuss, Omnicron and general Covid dispersion
  • Social contagion effects, where being sensitive to Covid became a moral panic due to the easy signaling via mask (the signal lost its value as it became more common)
  • Left wing resentment over Trump’s tenure dying out after Biden won
  • Massive worldwide economic effects being felt after almost two full years of lockdowns
  • Ordinary ‘rank and file’ progressives no longer being able to stomach not seeing their family & friends two years running
  • General fatigue with imposed authoritarian demands like testing, restaurants closing etc (many people knew folks who lost their business due to lockdowns)
  • Lack of trust in the medical establishment as it became clear they lied and/or massively exaggerated the risks posed by Covid and the effectiveness of masking/vaccines

The list can go on, but there was far more depth to the situation since it affected almost the entire world, quite quickly, and let to massive changes.

I’d imagine the history books will have quite a lot to say about the reaction to Covid, and how it shaped trends moving forward through the 21st century.

I honestly feel a lot of the COVID hawks just assume the vaccine was a lot more effective than it actually is, and thus happily just kind of said 'Oh, vaccine's available, back to normal life' whilst simultaneously overrating the impact of COVID & the vaccine by a major factor.

Also I've got friends who are still habitual maskers, but the majority were germophobes & borderline OCD-types even before the pandemic who've now got license to indulge their pre-existing instincts and interests.

I just did a Fri-Sun day boat trip to Sweden with the lads and thought about the remnants of Covid response. The boat transported several thousand people to Stockholm and back to Helsinki, and I don't think I saw any masks whatsoever while on board (though I was also quite drunk enough to pay scarce attention at most times, as is tradition on a Finland-Sweden ferry). While walking around in Stockholm during the 6-hour landing on Saturday, I saw zero masks, either.

The bus I took from my home to city centre and the bus I then took to Helsinki, at least, continued to have prominent "Thank you for wearing a mask!" decals on the door, but the total amount of maskers I saw on both of these buses was one. It's quite interesting how these "Covid reminders" still continue to stick around but pretty much no-one pays any attention to them or, at some level, probably even realizes they still exist - unless something makes them suddenly notice them. They're the fnords of the modern society.

I still see "please mask" decals in many places in California. Nobody does. I've seen maybe one or two persons wearing a mask in the workplace, like in reception, but it could be the case where they had some medical reasons. Haven't seen any maskers on the streets, in the stores or in public transport for a long while. For a Californian, having signs about something everywhere and totally ignoring them is routine, see prop 65.

I've seen maybe one or two persons wearing a mask in the workplace, like in reception, but it could be the case where they had some medical reasons.

I've seen people do that for two reasons: pollen allergy (a friend claims this helps him quite a bit) or if they have a cold but need to visit the office / doctor's / some other similar place.

Yes, I assumed it was more likely to be one of those.

continued to have prominent "Thank you for wearing a mask!" decals on the door

I see a lot of those signs around and very few people wearing masks. At least that wording doesn't imply that you're required to wear a mask, but it's still weird and annoying to have those signs up if they don't mean it. Especially since some spaces actually do require masks, but the signs are everywhere, so they're meaningless.

I did a Scandinavia trip (every capital) this time last year and virtually the only mask I saw were on Americans and Asians. Was going to do the Helsinki to Stockholm boat but did Tallinn to Stockholm instead. Good time.

I have not seen a mask in public in like a year +.

Sometime early in the pandemic I picked up the hobby of reading old Flu pandemic newspaper articles. One of the most interesting common points after the pandemic was that after about 2 years pandemic interest just sort of died out. The papers didn't have much analysis besides noting that people just stopped caring about it. I don't know if the flu strains ceased evolved to be less lethal or people just collectively decided to care more about quality of life over quantity of life but given they did the same thing with little external reason I suspect it's something inherent in humanity.

after about 2 years pandemic interest just sort of died out

Surely that has something to do with the fact that the pandemic itself had died out by then.

One possibility I haven't seen mentioned yet: the longevity of the Chinese response. Covid hawks' utopian ideal is "zero Covid" accomplished via a "short, sharp lockdown" modelled on the Chinese response - lock the entire country down completely for two weeks, no exceptions, and then we can immediately go back to normal. Any (perfectly legitimate) complaints about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns in Western nations could be handily dismissed because Real Western Lockdowns Have Never Been Tried, and if only we'd done a short, sharp lockdown like China did, this would all have been over by now.

Of course, as 2021 turned into 2022 and China was still locking down entire cities at the drop of a hat, it became increasingly hard to take these claims of the effectiveness of the Chinese approach seriously, and "zero Covid" was exposed as the obvious pipe dream it always was, one which could never be accomplished either locally or internationally. And if you recognise that zero Covid is unachievable, how can you still be a Covid hawk? It was their Leon Festinger moment, and the only hawks left are those stubbornly refusing to recognise the impossibility of "zero Covid".

If zero Covid is impossible, what are the implications for humanity if we truly do get a pandemic with a high mortality rate?

I think that a lot of pandemic preparedness scenarios are for that exact situation, so many of the existing plans were way over the top for something weak like Covid. That being said, even a totalitarian state's failure to prevent the spread despite massive measures is quite frightening.

The only NPI which really seemed consistently effective at stopping the spread of Covid was rigidly enforced border controls. It's rather telling that Covid hawks, outside of praising China, routinely touted the effectiveness of the approaches taken by Australia and New Zealand. The restrictions enacted by these countries were not dramatically different from those in blue states or European countries, and what differences they did have were a matter of degree and duration rather than anything game-changingly qualitative. Where they differ is that they enacted strict border controls early on and were able to enforce them by virtue of being geographically isolated islands without land borders. Covid hawks were keen to ignore this crucial last point, as it undermined a key tenet of their faith (that lockdowns are both extremely effective when implemented properly*, and equally effective in every region). It's more comfortable to attribute NZ's success in flattening the curve to Jacinta Ardern's #girlboss energy than to acknowledge the obvious point that border controls exist for a reason.

Lesson 1: if you're scared of future pandemics, marry a Kiwi bird and sharpish.

Lesson 2 is that the only other thing which really put a dent in Covid hospitalisation and fatality rates was mass vaccination. So we have to start rolling out vaccines faster than now. Operation Warp Speed made vaccines available faster than the FDA standard, but in a crisis that still won't be fast enough. The lesson of AIDS may be instructive: in the 80s when AIDS was a death sentence, the desperate young men dying in droves were willing to take a chance on just about any experimental treatment, no matter how much of a long shot, and my understanding is that this risk calculus was tacitly endorsed by the medical establishment. The proposed vaccines for New!Pathogen don't have to prove efficacy: they have to prove they won't kill or maim you, then we can start administering them in clinics to people who are sufficiently scared of New!Pathogen that they'll try treatments explicitly advertised as experimental and unproven. Do regular follow-ups which are tabulated in an internationally accessible database (like VAERS) and whittle away the wheat (the effective vaccine candidates) from the chaff (the ones that do more harm than good or which are harmless but don't stop you contracting it, being hospitalised with it or dying from it).

For what it's worth, the approach actually adopted by most Western governments in combating Covid was quite far removed from those same governments' pandemic preparedness plans, many of which were published a year or two prior to March 2020.

*"when implemented properly" is a moving target usually determined post hoc: whenever lockdowns fail at their stated goal, the public is blamed for selfishly failing to abide by them, regardless of whether any evidence exists that noncompliance was common.

The Black Death killed something like 25% of Europe’s population with no way to prevent it.

There’s still hardcore Covid hawks out there. It’s just that partisan liberals who never particularly cared about the virus qua virus found something else to obsess over.

Let's say 30% of the population are Covid skeptics, 20% are Covid hawks and 50% are Covid cattle. The cattle follow what the authorities tell them. If the authorities are hawkish, then it's 70 vs 30, and the skeptics have to either toe the party line and shut up or risk fines and ostracism.

If the authorities are skeptical about Covid, then it's 80 vs 20, and the hawks have to either toe the party line and shut up or risk... not fines in this case, but ostracism and ridicule. Without the amplifier that is the media their views can no longer reach the public.

I think the protests in China had an effect. Being a Covid hawk went from being “one of the responsible people” to “I think that China was right to weld starving people in their apartments and kill that one guy’s dog.”

Obviously a more nuanced position is possible, but not on Twitter :)

Then China opened up and as far as I’m aware nothing happened. Plus the lockdown spirit has metastasised into the UN, public health and the civil service where it’s harder to see; most of the remaining Covid hawks are focused on minimising discussion of lockdowns at all rather than litigating it in the public eye.

Then China opened up and as far as I’m aware nothing happened.

As far as we all know, which may not be very much given how China probably would sit on any bad news coming out. But for now, things look like they're back on an even keel.

This matches pretty cleanly with the model that it was always feasible to basically ignore Covid. If Western governments had been invested in getting people to not freak out instead of getting people to maximally freak out, the people that were Covid-cautious would likely have always been seen as hypochondriacs.

I've ways had a suspicion that some of the induced hysteria at least in the US was - for some people, on some level - an attempt to hurt Trump.

After Trump got covid, took Remdesevir, ended up fine, and made a public statement to the effect of "Don't be afraid, dont let this take over your life", the unanimous response of 'responsible people' as typified by Andrew Cuomo was "You should be afraid! Covid could kill you!"

I still think about this occasionally; how pathetic it was and out of sync it was with the national character we apparently pretend to extoll. How smart, serious people promoted neurotic, debilitating worry, and the Clown Prince was the one being sensible and imploring some healthy perspective - and then chastised for it despite being ultimately vindicated over time judging by everybody's behavior over the following years after his loss.

I think that’s a part of it, but I think there’s a large contingent of the establishment that are just generally safety-ists and think that it’s always unacceptable to downplay a risk. Some if this comes from working in agencies. The number of things that to the mind of a regulator that are “dangerous” are really crazy. The manufacting process of all kinds of things give of some (usually small) amount of chemicals that in sufficient amounts might cause a problem. And I recall listening to an interview with someone studying people allergic to chemicals in clothing. To hear this woman talk, clothing (at least as manufactured today) are full of toxic chemicals, release micro plastics, and are manufactured using other toxic chemicals. To a person who sees the world in this manner, the entire planet is toxic. Add in the other things that might be dangerous, and these types are constantly ringing alarm bells. Some caution might be warranted on occasion, but the entire regulatory system is full of chicken littles warning that a practice is dangerous or a product if full of toxic chemicals.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that the vast majority of modern Americans go most of their lives in pretty safe conditions risking nothing more serious than paper-cuts and shin splits. So without a healthy perspective on risks in general, they tend to take it to absolutely bonkers levels of risk avoidance. A healthy relationship with risk is that you look at your own levels of risk against other factors. People who work in more risky industries tend to get that. An electrician works with electrical equipment every day. That equipment, if he makes a serious mistake can kill him, and he damn well knows it. He also knows not to make that mistake and to take precautions so he doesn’t make that mistake. You can go down the list of other skilled labor or factory workers or whatever, and they all have risks inherent to their work. They have to get over the fear to function.

Then China opened up and as far as I’m aware nothing happened.

Or perhaps a lot happened.

Perhaps a lot did happen. Still, that quick Economist writeup is so bad that it should mostly just diminish your opinion of The Economist.

Thanks for the link! Certainly, I would be interested to know if those are the true numbers.

At the risk of being callous, though, the data shows that given up on lockdown increased the risk of death for over-65s in a mostly unvaccinated population by 30% over the usual. Bad, obviously, but I remember the Covid hawk position as being a lot stronger than that. I don't think this backs them up.

Does it say it is a mostly unvaccinated population? China claims to have vaccinated the vast majority of the population though with a vaccine that is probably less effective than those used in the West

Much less effective, from what I’d heard. I rounded that down to “mostly unvaccinated” but fair enough, I should have used a weaker statement.

Neither one is at all effective against Omicron -- considering that we are looking at 2023 data here vax status seems irrelevant.

This is false. Needless to say, we don't have studies (at least not ones we trust) on the effectiveness of the vaccines China used. But we do have studies showing the ones the United States used remain highly effective against severe disease and death.

There's actually some weak evidence the Omicron-updated vaccines are worse against Omicron because we made them a half dose of the old vaccine and a half dose of the Omicron-adjusted version, which might be more similar to giving the vaccine at a half dose. (There is evidence the updated vaccine did a better job of protection against infection for Omicron... but it was never very high, never lasted very long, and the study suggested the currently circulating variants have drifted far enough that there's no measurable protection against infection anymore... probably will see a slight bump with the next formula update, but that's mostly a research curiosity.)

This is false. Needless to say, we don't have studies (at least not ones we trust) on the effectiveness of the vaccines China used. But we do have studies showing the ones the United States used remain highly effective against severe disease and death.

Great to see that vaccine hawks are alive and well, at least!

The western vaccine studies are exactly as trustworthy as the Chinese ones, for exactly the same reasons -- nobody has yet been able to suggest to me a convincing mechanism by which a vaccine does ~nothing to prevent infection and yet is significantly protective against severe outcomes. Are you up for that?

More comments

Ultimately, it is very difficult to use what happened in China among a largely vaccinated (with a mediocre vaccine) population to infer what would have happened in a completely unvaccinated population with higher rates of comorbidities such as obesity.

Wasn't there a particularly high rate of vaccine hesitancy among the Chinese elderly or something?

Beyond the vaccination rates that gdanning points toward (though I'm skeptical of those numbers too), the Zhejiang data is three months of official data during a single surge. If you believe China had managed to completely block any and all fatalities before 2023, these numbers kinda work; if you're at all skeptical of the official Chinese COVID numbers, this analysis only provides an increase over the earlier increase beyond base rates.

((There's also some outside risks that historical malnutrition made younger (eg 45-65) Chinese people in the more rural provinces more vulnerable to COVID than those elsewhere, if still not as vulnerable as 65+s, in which case the Economist's napkin math starts to fall apart. But that's reading tea leaves from India, and China isn't India.))

There's plenty of maskers around my area; I assume most of these are Covid-hawks. The Covid hawks simply found themselves completely outnumbered by the Covid-exhausted, to the point where e.g. NJ Governor Phil Murphy found himself in a real contest for re-election. The media tried to maintain the illusion otherwise but uncharacteristically, they were unable; compare the social media reactions to the end of the airline mask rules to much of the legacy media reactions.

In Poland it was extremely noticeable that media jumped on Russo-Ukrainian war as a new hot topic.

See first recording of Russian attacks on cities: people in shelters are often masked. But it quickly went away. And various Covid restrictions were de facto/de iure dropped as part of refugee handling.

Maybe it was noticeable also elsewhere?

As bonus many accounts on FB/Twitter switched from "Covid is fake" to "Russian invasion is fake" or other variants (microchip in vaccines to claims that Ukraine will invade Poland and so on).

As bonus many accounts on FB/Twitter switched from "Covid is fake" to "Russian invasion is fake" or other variants (microchip in vaccines to claims that Ukraine will invade Poland and so on).

And simultaneously or a bit later on to "Climate change is fake", which is also the position from which a fair number of notable Covid/vaccine theorists also originally pivoted to "Covid is fake".

Be on the lookout now for the war’s reintroducing of the plague. Still waiting to see that pop up in the media.

Some reports were mentioned, but nowadays it is not going to spread too far outside combat zone.

If we are going to have a covid posts then we should probably discuss that the “lab leak” is just a conspiracy talk. Supposedly we had breaking news lately of people like Kristen Anderson who was the quoted scientists for definitely not a lab leak had many private messages where he was still very much thinking it might be true when he talked to other scientist.

I don’t even thing lab leak or not lab leak is that interesting. It’s the coverup and censorship that was bigger.

I've been working on a top-level comment trying to branch off of Nate Silver's analysis. It's been pretty depressing, not just on the question of lab-leak or no, or COVID-specific censorship or gain-of-function research, or even of the reliability of scientific researchers, but about broader problems of governance and oversight.

I think you could make the argument that it points to a lot of the broader problems for "COVID hawks" -- as a more libertarian one, the combination of bad acts by and absolute resistance to any review of the highest-profile technical experts favoring the mainstream response to COVID has removed much of the relevant discussion space. There are still policy questions that matter, but they're not actually being discussed when the policy questions that actually get applied are apparently going to include bans on religious meetings or having police hold down people to apply vaccines or going full Korematsu.

I see it brought up a lot in an Irish context as a way of shutting people down by claiming that they're the same type of person who protested Covid restrictions. However much Covid itself has dropped out of the discussion, a portion of the pro and anti lockdown camps have solidified into something more permanent. Right now they're arguing about refugees and 15 minute cities and next year it might be something different, but I expect the tribes themselves to remain motivated and at odds with each other.

In terms of more concrete consequences, business at my job is going very poorly this summer but my boss's accounting software still shows us doing much better than last year.

Covid was well suited to create maximum culture war for a couple of reasons. First, it was legitimately dangerous and killed many people, the most dangerous pandemic in the US in over 100 years, and yet it was nowhere close to apocalyptic Stephen King superflu levels. Second, it appeared right in the middle of the hysteria over Trump and in an election year.

I think this broke the brains of extremists on both sides. You could not rationally deny that the thing was legitimately dangerous and deadly, so full-on Covid skeptics of the "it's just a cold / it's just a hoax" variety were always swimming against the tide of reality. However, you also could not justify a China-level authoritarian response and expect more than a small fraction of the population to go along with it, so people who were either terrified of Covid or wanted to use it to justify their pet political ambitions felt that they were swimming against the tide of public sentiment.

That Covid emerged four years into the whole brouhaha over Trump enhanced the political effects.

I think that probably most Americans just half-assed obeying the Covid regulations and trying to protect themselves from Covid. In some rural towns probably no-one changed anything at all. In some highly Democratic cities a bunch of people followed the regulations quite closely. But the average American just half-assed it, following some laws, breaking others, and certainly not spending hours a day arguing online about the whole thing. This is why most people no longer pay any attention to Covid. It came, it went, and if you did not lose a loved one or at least your business to it it really does not seem to matter that much in retrospect unless you are the kind of politics junkie who is profoundly concerned with the political meaning and consequences of those events.

I myself half-assed my response to Covid and in retrospect, I actually wish that I had done a bit more to try to prevent spread of the disease. It just didn't seem real to me until the first time I heard about someone I knew closely having a relative who had died from it. After I heard of that death, I felt guilty about the times I had gone out to bars that were still open due to loopholes, that sort of thing. And I still feel guilty about it, whether that is rational or not I do not know.

I actually wish that I had done a bit more to try to prevent spread of the disease.

The only thing your increased caution may have accomplished is slightly delaying the date you became infected with covid. You couldn't have prevented covid from spreading.

There was never any chance that this thing would be controlled with quarantines or even far more effective vaccines if we had them - since covid infects non-human animals and now has undoubtably many natural reservoirs, we could never eradicate it like we did with smallpox (only infects humans). It's also insanely contagious - we'd all have needed new, fit-tested n95s for every time we went out and goggles to boot (your eyes are connected to your nose and throat - aerosols that land on them/in them can travel downwards and voila, covid infection).

For adults 18-45 covid was more like a bad influenza strain, if you look at deaths by age group it becomes very apparent that it was really a disease of the old with some obese younger adults thrown in. Look at this age stratification https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-total-covid-deaths-by-age-group/

2% (85+) of the US population made up 27% of the deaths!

I have found masking to still be quite prevalent around me...among a certain felonious subset of people. Ballcap, mask, & backpack. Stroll into the liquor aisle, grab a bunch of Patron, stroll out.

I don't know to what extent I count as a covid hawk... but certainly people like me gave covid hawks political strength during the pandemic.

In the early stages when dealing with very limited information, I thought it made all the sense in the world to treat it seriously and do what we could to combat it. Early on I assumed that we wouldn't be able to stop it, but "flatten the curve" made sense to me as a practical way to reduce the negative impact. In countries like yours and mine, those efforts were surprisingly successful and made me see it as plausible that the virus could be heavily suppressed until effective vaccines were developed that would then be able to essentially eliminate the virus.

Obviously that's not the way things turned out. New variants became more transmissible (and thankfully also less lethal). The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be. It became clear that there was not going to be a covid-free future and the best we could do was get vaxxed and get on with life. At this point I strongly oppose any sort of restriction - we're done with full measures and there's no point in half measures.

I do think that there's a strain of covid dove - well represented on this forum - that badly misread pandemic politics and got quite radicalised. They didn't really grok that support for covid restrictions was both strong but also temporary and conditional for a critical mass of people. We were willing to make sacrifices when we saw a point and a purpose to them, but they were still sacrifices. We were never going to continue them forever for no reason.

We were never going to continue them forever for no reason.

But a lot of them went as long as they did without any reason whatsoever. There's no way the "mask up in a restaurany, but only when not sitting down" mandate could have possibly prevented transmission. Same for restrictions on going outside.

It's much more plausible that the powers that be made all the hay they were going to make out of COVID, so they moved on. People stopped supporting lockdowns only after they stopped getting their daily dose of reinforcement from the media, not because they decided it no longer makes sense.

I think Australia is a very unusual case, because for us, until Christmas '21, Covid suppression actually worked. This was because we closed the borders fast enough to keep the numbers at a level where test & trace was enough. Although we became lockdown poster-child, we were actually far more open for most of the time because there was simply no Covid around to suppress.

Then came the Delta wave, which we might or might not have got on top of with lockdowns and travel restirctions. But what we definiately did do was ruin Christmas, especially for those of us travelling to Queensland. And at just that time, Omnicron comes along knocking both Delta and Covid suppression sixes-at-will. The whole country just gave up, except for some idiots at the Saturday Paper who thought that politicians overruling public health bureaucrats was "the tail wagging the dog".

In other words, by luck or good management, Australians -- including the decision makers -- supported lockdowns when they worked and gave up on them when they stopped working. In other countries, the lockdowns never worked, but were still enforced (with public support) for at least as long as in Australia.

The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be

I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.

It became clear that there was not going to be a covid-free future and the best we could do was get vaxxed and get on with life

To my knowledge, current circulating covid variants are not causing excess mortality, so that's as good of an outcome as being covid-free? It seems a bit convenient and too-many-degrees-of-freedom that the vaccines prevented death, and then the variants independently became less deadly and now covid's not an issue, but I think that's what happened. So I don't think that our current situation is particularly non-ideal, or that the vaccines failed in some significant way.

I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.

Really? Compare it to the vaccines for Measles, Polio, smallpox, or all the diseases that have fallen out of the public consciousness because they were (largely) eradicated due to vaccination campaigns. I was hoping for success at that scale, and the vaccines we have are not up to the task.

Considering coronaviruses in general are seasonal respiratory viruses and this is a new variant, spreading to humans either naturally from animals or from a lab escape of virus collected from animals, I think the flu (animal hosts, new variants, seasonal disease) is a closer analogue than measles - and seasonal flu vaccines don't successfully eradicate the flu, but are useful and successful despite that.

but are useful and successful despite that.

"Useful" is a far cry from effective at "the only really important thing"

What I'm claiming is that the, say, practical or utilitarian impact of the vaccines in terms of preventing deaths was almost as good as it would've been if they'd fully stopped transmission, which ... seems like the important part. That the media messaging around it and cultural norms around it was very confused doesn't change that.

Contracting COVID had also become socially shameful; friends of mine reacted to exposures or infections as one might to an STI. A vaccine that could not protect against this was unsatisfactory, so they yelled “anti-vaxer!” at people on Facebook for saying the vaccine could not protect against this.

Which is very dumb, but doesn't have much to do with how practically useful or effective the vaccine, the technological artifact, is. We (correctly) don't do that with the flu!

What I'm claiming is that the, say, practical or utilitarian impact of the vaccines was almost as good as it would've been if they'd fully stopped transmission

But you're wrong. The only way you van come to this conclusion is if you disregard the preferences of people who didn't want to get vaccinated but were forced to, or who had their doubt's, got talked into it, and now regret it. You can gloss over these objections when vaccination prevents transmission, because it protects more than just the person getting vaccinated, but you can't if the impact is individual.

Wait no, this whole conversation began with Ash's

The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be

And my response

I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.

I'm just talking about the effectiveness of the vaccine itself, not about negative aspects of the way it's used. I'm not 'glossing over' them, I'm just not talking about them, it's a separate but reasonable (if beaten to death) discussion to have.

You're the one that brought up "practical utilitarian impact". If the argument is about only the vaccines themselves then he was correct that they only "kinda-sorta work", because they don't prevent transmission, which is "really important thing" when it comes to vaccines.

When I read 'the vaccine was kinda-sorta effective', it seems to be a statement about the vaccine, not about the social response (and if we're down to "what do those words mean" that probably means we don't actually disagree)

To whever extent vaccines thwarted our overall covid strategy, that was the fault of the strategy. Even if vaccines prevented transmission and we had confidently known that initially, long-term restrictions still would've been way too harsh in a reasonable cost-benefit analysis imo, I don't think it changes the cost-benefit much*, because either way you have to keep restrictions up until the vaccine comes out and whether or not transmission is prevented the vaccine still eliminates the vast majority of mortality/morbidity.

*I still think the costs are significantly less than many others here, but the benefits are still much smaller

More comments

I'm really not sure why you two are arguing, but for clarity: I was indeed talking about the effectiveness of the vaccine, and I was indeed saying that I had hoped it would meaningfully reduce transmission (enough to get R below 1).

I acknowledge that it's not fair to say that the vaccines "didn't work" because they didn't meet that standard. But at the same time it is fair to say they "didn't work in the way that I had hoped" and this impacted the kinds of policies I was willing to support. E.g. I was supportive of a certain amount of coercion to get people vaxxed (although not the actual forms of coercion that were used - I wanted a $50 fine). At this point however I don't see that as justifiable, given that the externality benefits of vaccination are basically nonexistent.

That makes sense! I didn't think lockdowns or curve-flattening were particularly valuable in 2020, so the vaccine didn't ever feel like it didn't meet my expectations. I continue to think a better pandemic plan would've been immediate rapid trials on effective non-pharmaceutical interventions (masks, UV, whatever), and maybe general use of those / selective rollouts of those to the most vulnerable populations + people who interact with them, and then continue that until vaccine is available.

At this point however I don't see that as justifiable, given that the externality benefits of vaccination are basically nonexistent.

I don't see how the $50 fine is that different from e.g. taxes on cigarettes / unhealthy food / penalties for not wearing a seatbelt, in principle. Although taxes on cigarettes don't work that well. A vaccine fine might work better (it translate hard-to-understand small risks of significant harm to visible and predictable inconvenience). Not that I think it's a good policy, i dunno, haven't thought about it, even before considering political backlash.

I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.

This is immense amount of cope given the original claims of herd immunity and all the rest. The vaccines were supposed to make all the severe lockdowns and immense damage they brought upon our society "worth it". If people knew that the result of a year-long anxiety, isolation, interruption of education and so forth would be cutting deaths of very old and very ill people somewhat - and all that after the epidemic already took its toll year before, this would not be accepted. Hell, we have CDC advocating for adding COVID vaccine as mandatory schedule for kids. I think this decision is more about saving face for these experts than based on actual merit and prevention of severe illnesses among adolescents.

Hell, we have CDC advocating for adding COVID vaccine as mandatory schedule for kids. I think this decision is more about saving face for these experts than based on actual merit and prevention of severe illnesses among adolescents.

I won't be surprised if a requirement for the original COVID vaccine remains a part of immigration law for decades. Imagine marrying someone in the US after having come over to visit them dozens of times (vaccine-free), only to be told that you have to get a shot that has been obsolete for ten years... just so that some folks can save face about the political positions they took back in the day.

so that's as good of an outcome as being covid-free?

Not when the Covid hawks spent two years arguing (baselessly) that "zero Covid" was within our reach if we just did this One Neat Trick.

Sure, they were wrong, but that doesn't make the vaccine not great!

which is the only really important thing.

There is no way I can believe this argument us being made in good faith. You know preventing transmission is another important thing that actually working vaccines do, and you know it was explicitly argued that the COVID vaccines do it as well.

The only reason we care about COVID-19 is severe illness and death. There are many other circulating coronaviruses that didn't cause unusually high rates of severe illness, and we do not care about those.

you know it was explicitly argued that the COVID vaccines do it as well.

(low confidence) That was argued, and seemed plausible at the time! It ended up not being true. But, since it still prevented severe illness and death, people who got the vaccine died a lot less! And most people in high-risk groups got the vaccine. Which is, I think, a success, since the one bad thing was prevented!

It's weird to imagine scenarios where covid doesn't mutate to become less deadly but the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. Why couldn't it mutate to become more deadly? I vaguely think there's a trend to become less deadly to become more transmissible, but it's clearly not universal given the many deadly diseases of the past.

The only reason we care about COVID-19 is severe illness and death.

And an important part of preventing it, is preventing transmission, therefore lowering the severity of the illness was not the only important thing for a vaccine.

That was argued, and seemed plausible at the time!

Why did they argue it, if lowering the severity of the illness was the only important thing?

Why couldn't it mutate to become more deadly?

It could, but its a random process and if it mutates to kill you quicker it prevents its own spread.

I'm hawkish on covid, and I think about it occasionally. EG, during covid I realized I fucking hated eating inside restaurants/going to indoor concerts where the music is amplified purely for noise related reasons so I still do as much as a can outdoors (I pay extra to live in socal, might as well enjoy the weather).

Omicron and further variants has pushed it firmly into the endemic phase and various vaccines are working at various levels of good enough; no point in closing the barn door after the horse is out and I've bought a new horse. I'll take a booster if I see a bunch of people near me get it bad enough to get put on their ass or in the ground, otherwise It's out of my mind like the flue.

My main concern is post viral symptoms associated with covid, because I have some bets on it. I got one payed out for heart damage from Covid Original flavor (one cool bottle of Makers 46 FO cask), but the data for Covid Zero and Chery Vanilla Covid re-heart damage isn't in yet/doesn't look too good for me unless a bunch of studies come out by the end of the year; meaning I might be out a bottle of Del Maguey. I'm still waiting on anything re. kidney damage, but that one has no end date; only when we can agree it is/ isn't happening.

I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.

Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.

The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.

Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.

The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.

Recently someone asked about that time when I translated Vasily "Vatoadmin" Topolev's overview of 20-year intervals in the 20th century, here it is:

Writing about current events is tough, so let's do some minor league historiosophy.

Many people may know that Andrei Amalrik wrote the book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" in 1969. He was only seven years wrong, it turns out. But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980, but Hélène (incidentally, born Zarubashvili of Russian-Georgian aristocratic émigrés) is still alive and even became secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

Far fewer people know what the forecast itself was. Amalrik believed that the USSR would collapse as a result of war with China. In reality, the USSR collapsed after six years of consistently improving relations with China. Carrère d'Ancoss expected a mass Islamist uprising in Central Asia (as in Iran). In reality, the Central Asian republics were the last to leave the Union, after not only the Baltics, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, but even after the RSFSR and the BSSR – that is, when there was no Union at all. But who remembers that now?

Paul Samuelson is considered one of the most illustrious economists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize and wrote his famous textbook, which was used for decades by students all over the planet in their economics 101 course. Samuelson believed that by 1990 the USSR would overtake the United States in gross domestic product. Then he shifted his forecast a bit: by 2000.

In 1987, Yale historian Paul Kennedy (no, not a relative of the president) published his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (translated into Russian a couple of years ago). The book brought Kennedy worldwide fame – he described the change of the dominant powers over the course of 500 years. Except that the first cover of the book had a picture (https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780517051009-us.jpg): the Briton John Bull coming down from the top of the globe, the American Uncle Smith standing on the top, but a bespectacled Japanese sneaking up behind him. Kennedy believed that American domination of the world would be succeeded by the Japanese domination (he did not actually say it that explicitly, but it was easy to notice). In the real world, a few years after the book was published, Japan was hit by a severe economic crisis – some offices in downtown Tokyo became 100 (yes one hundred) times cheaper, and the nineties were labeled "the lost decade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades)" by the Japanese themselves.

Everyone knows that the brilliant Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a brilliant book called The Grand Chessboard. Only no one has read it. But I have. The main idea of the book is that the power that controls pipelines in Central Asia will dominate in the 21st century. Brilliant. Who even remembers these pipes now, even against the backdrop of the global energy crisis.

In July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II promised soldiers that they would be back from the front before the first autumn leaves touched the ground. And the Kaiser was not alone. That the outcome of the war would be decided in the first months was the opinion of wise generals in all the general staffs of Europe. The French, based on the Franco-Prussian experience (you know that bit, the fight between two democracies?) believed that the outcome of the war would be decided in the first month – and have had a hundred thousand men felled in the Ardennes in a narrow area over four days, throwing them in pointless attacks on the German machine guns. The Russians threw two newly mobilized corps, in which half of the soldiers remained in sandals, on Königsberg – and the East Prussian disaster happened. The Austrians, too, threw their dressy – the prettiest uniforms in the world! – toy-like regiments to the Carpathians, where they were ground to dust in a few months by the harsh Siberian, Cossack, Grenadier, Guard and other select regiments of the Russian army.

In this light, let me remind you of an old idea of mine. We will scroll through the twentieth century, 20 years at a time.

So, let's start on January 1, 1900. What does the world look like?

World politics is defined in three capitals – London, Berlin, St. Petersburg.

The British, after the Boer War, are the world's pariahs. They have very bad relations with literally all other great powers. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, they even banned the British delegation. India is once again preparing for a Russian invasion.

France is sandwiched between the British and the Germans. The former can easily take her colonies, the latter can defeat her in a one-on-one war. The most militarized country in Europe. When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.

Germany is the European leader. The world's most advanced science – soon Germans will be raking in handfuls of Nobel prizes. The best universities in the world are not Harvard or Oxford, but Göttingen and Heidelberg. A mighty army. The world's second largest navy – thirty years ago there was none at all. Berlin is called the "Electroburg"; it's the most progressive and cleanest city in the world, kind of like Singapore today.

Russia has tremendous industrial growth, the highest in the world. The St. Petersburg Stock Exchange will reach a peak this year to which it will never return, not even by 1914, after the Stolypin reform. There are plans to build a huge fleet by 1920, with only battleships counting 50. Korea, Manchuria, and Persia are gradually turning into Russian colonies.

China, recently defeated in a war with Japan, seems determined to modernize along Japanese lines. Although right now the country is in an extremely deplorable state, China is genuinely feared. Both in Russia [ru link reddit'd], and in America [for good measure], and everywhere else. Kaiser Wilhelm paints a picture [] in which the Archangel Michael calls upon all the nations of Europe to go to holy war against the Asian hordes. Somewhere near China lies Japan, which has yet to receive much attention. The King of England and the Tsar of Russia call the Japanese macaques in their correspondence.

The U.S. is already very rich, but it is almost invisible in world politics. The American army is ranked by the German General Staff on a level with the Portuguese army. The American navy has only five small battleships. Unexpectedly, the Americans went to war with the other "weaklings," the Spaniards, and although they won, they ended up with an endless guerrilla war in the Philippines. All in all, simmering somewhere on the periphery.

Scroll to 1920.

There is no such thing as a Chinese empire. The Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires are similarly non-existent. In place of the Russian Empire there is a giant bloody stain. Germany, cut off from all sides, is steadily teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. All of Europe, down to Poland and Romania, is now dominated by France. The British Empire is even larger than it was in 1900. The U.S. has become a great military power. Wall Street, swollen during the war, turned from a peripheral financial center into a competitor to the City of London. Japan began to build its empire, suddenly becoming one of the world's great powers.

Fast forward to 1940.

The U.S. is still trying to get out of the Great Depression. France as a state simply does not exist, unless you count the mysterious entity centered in the resort town of Vichy. Russia, torn apart by civil war, was replaced by the giant Soviet Union. Germany, recently humiliated and defeated, has now conquered almost all of Europe. The British, recent triumphators, are preparing for a German landing and hiding from German bombs. Japan has already conquered a good half of China and is not going to stop.

Another turn of the knob and we go to 1960.

The U.S. has experienced a decade and a half of frenzied economic growth. The country is bursting with exuberance. U.S. military bases are spread across the globe. The Soviet Union, which many had already given up on in 1942, has recovered, has rid itself of the worst features of totalitarianism, is preparing to send a man into space, and is competing equally with the United States in the most sophisticated fields of technology – lasers, atomic, space, aviation. Germany and Japan are now almost the most peaceful countries in the world, especially since both are de facto occupied by U.S. and Soviet troops. Italy, until very recently one of the poorest countries in Europe, which has also suffered terribly after two years of warfare on its territory, is showing the highest growth rate in Europe and will soon overtake even Britain. Fewer and fewer territories remain of the British Empire, which was supposedly victorious in World War II, and those too will soon be independent. France is a great power again. Germany is experiencing its economic miracle. The Shah of Iran is determined to use petrodollars to turn his country into the most developed and enlightened in the Middle East.

And we are already in 1980.

America has been in stagflation for years. Society is afflicted by the depression and the Vietnam syndrome, with the main movie of the generation being The Taxi Driver and such. Britain is even worse off than the United States. The USSR continues to expand its sphere of influence and pump up its military might, taking advantage of the rain of petrodollars. The vast majority of Sovietologists do not expect the collapse of the Soviet state in the coming decades. China is in ruins after the Cultural Revolution. Japan seems to many to be the next world economic leader. Germany is called the "sick man of Europe."

Here comes the year 2000.

The USSR does not exist. China is developing at an incredible rate. The Japanese call the 90's the "lost decade", their economy has stopped growing. The U.S. has attained a dominance unprecedented in history – in economics, finance, technology, military power, and politics. Once again, London has become one of the world's two major financial centers.

Every time we turn the knob twenty years ahead, we find ourselves in an entirely new world that no one could have predicted beforehand. Yes, some features could be guessed, but not the picture as a whole. And haven't yet written anything about all sorts of third- or fourth-rate countries.

Today's observers expect to see in ten or twenty years a world that will be basically the same as it is today, but with one change. Russia will fall apart, or the United States will be torn apart by civil war, or China will have its own Great Depression and overthrow the Communist Party. But imagine a world in which there would be none of the constituent parts we are accustomed to today – not the United States, not the European Union, not China, not Russia, not Ukraine, not (insert country name of preference) in their current form. Some will become more powerful, and some will disappear altogether – temporarily or permanently. Judging by the news, the likelihood of such a world is getting higher by the day.

... and then 20 years later things are exactly the same, except for Covid, which is a blip on history. The Japanese economy is still bad, the USSR still doesn't exist, China is still developing, the US is still dominant.

The last two decades have been unremarkable indeed.

That said, my feeling is that we put too much emphasis on stories and not enough on statistics.

Would anyone in 1900 be surprised that America became a great power? They shouldn't have. The combination of population growth and natural resources made greatness a given.

The years from 2000–present are a time of consolidation for China. Every year, their economy grows at twice the rate of the West, and they still have hundreds of millions of rural peasants. Already their economy is quite a bit larger than the US (PPP) and still grows much faster.

The pressure builds beneath the surface and then erupts. History look only at the eruption, not the things that made it inevitable.

Yeah, I think unless you were alive at the time (and old enough to be aware of what was going on), you don't get how the Fall of the Berlin Wall was something astonishing. Overnight, the system had just gone up in smoke! What everyone had come to accept as "This stalemate between the US and the USSR is going to go on forever" was now just not happening anymore. The West had (seemingly) won.

That's just one of the many reasons why I've cooled so much on doomerist predictions, including "within five/ten/twenty years AI will be eating us alive!"

We can't even foretell what is going to happen next year with any certainty. Did anyone expect the pandemic? Did anyone expect it to go on for as long as it did? Before the 2008 crash the economists in my country were by and large assuring everyone the good times would continue to roll forever. Things were different now. We were never going to go back to the old days.

One aspect of doomerism is hard to knock back though. Climate change. Because it's not up to what people and nations do, anymore, barring some sudden and miraculous changes. The polycrisis era that climate change will bring is coming almost no matter what we do, isn't it?

Not at all. Climate change is eminently solvable, unlike AI alignment. Furthermore, its effects over the next 100 years will be quite small. Pity the poor animals who will be made extinct, but humans will adapt.

When are the eminent solutions going to appear?

Most Republicans don't believe climate change is a problem at all, your optimism is incoherent

When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.

I know I'm going off on a tangent here, but I recently read a Chesterton essay in a book of collected essays published in 1909, and he mentioned a French strike. I wondered if he was talking about the 1900 strike, so I looked up what strikes happened in France around that date. Well, they had a bunch of 'em from 1900 onwards, but I imagine the particular strike he was talking about was this one (to fit in with writing an essay that was published at the time and then a couple of years later in an anthology):

On May 1, 1906, the Confédération Générate du Travail (CGT), the national organization of French revolutionary syndicalism, demanded that the French government reduce the legal work day for industrial workers to eight hours. The CGT would back this request with force, and it called upon all workers to strike by May 2. The response was overwhelming; work-stoppage was widespread, and it appeared that government and industry would have to yield. By May 2, over 200,000 workers had walked off the job. The number of establishments affected was impressive. 295 strikes which called specifically for a work-day reduction involved 12,585 firms, a high figure compared to previous years. (Strikes for a ten-, nine-, or eight-hour work day were a part of the CGT's eight hour day movement.) For instance, only 14% of the strikes in 1904 and 16% in 1905 aimed primarily at a work-day reduction compared to 64% in 1906. Also, in 1905, there were only a total of 830 strikes affecting 177,666 workers and 5,302 establishments, while in 1904, 271,097 workers participated in 1,026 strikes involving 17,250 establishments. By comparison, the total number of firms struck in 1906 was 19,637 and involved 438,466 workers in 1,309 strikes. The Ministry of Labor conceded that the increased number had resulted from the CGT's eight-hour day movement.

We do have this image of the French perpetually going on (violent) strikes, and it made me smile to think they've been doing it so regularly for so long. Maybe Chesterton's conclusion here is indeed apt:

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty and Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so many such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line of horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and their helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen them by twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring round the squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like an invasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that lit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie into which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out, "The French soldiers!" There were the little men with the brown faces that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly as they now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square I saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; held by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against a revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. He said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que le chome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler." I said, "Ni moi non plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian. The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personally steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity), the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning out one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking about the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less harmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile as the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak, through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty for feeling itself on the eve of something—of the Bartholomew or the Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment. It is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally young. It is perpetually pulling down and building up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the column in the Place de La Bastille. France has always been at the point of dissolution. She has found the only method of immortality. She dies daily.

But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Whatever was good in her book she copied from Emmanuel Todd.

Very curious, but very frequent, is the attitude of some economists: after a little discussion of principle, they adopt the statistics provided by these soviet authorities who also prohibit the access of the three quarters of their territory to tourists, academics and western journalists.

Typical illustration of the elementary inconsistency of the model proposed by the communists to describe the soviet social system: if the U.S.S.R. had, as they claim, a stable social system, she would not be afraid of open its borders and allow free movement of people, almost sixty years after the revolution. We can, we must deduce from the closing of borders that soviet society is considered fragile by its leaders. If it is fragile, there are internal tensions fundamentals.

So how do we inform ourselves? The figures that describe the economic relations between communist and western countries - exports, imports - are verifiable. Those numbers must therefore be privileged for the analysis of communist economic systems. External exchanges can provide extremely valuable information about the inner workings of an economy.

Soviet statistics are sad and false, not totally hopeless. There are holes in the abundant production of the official statistics of the Soviet Union. Characteristic example: demography. The eras of purges, which should result in demographic terms, by an increase in the mortality rate age and a decline in the birth rate, appear clearly, in hollow one might say, as an absence of statistics. Collectivization, a period of civil war, of deportation tations and famines led to a disappearance of the complete information on death and birth statistics. Between 1924 and 1930, the birth rate hovered around 38-40 per thousand. From 1931 to 1935, the services of statistics did not provide this simple demographic index. Statistical holes, especially when they follow at a time of relative abundance in numbers, mark Stalinism. In China, the great leap forward was quickly followed by a big leap backwards from the previous abundance of statistics that alert us to the extent of "errors” of the Chinese Communist Party.

The age pyramid keeps encrusted, for decades, the mark of the "errors” of Stalinism, Maoism or any other totalitarian variety, who treat human society as a field to be cleared and left fallow, a blank page, like a game of massacre. We realized, a little late, that there was a shortage of 30 to 60 million inhabitants in the U.S.S.R. We notice, in 1975, that China is short of about 150 million.

The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict

And yet for much of human history it was very easy to predict - functionally zero for the vast majority of people. A Roman from 100 AD might be surprised that the brightest minds of 1600 were in misty Brittania or burned-over Germania, but he wouldn't be surprised at the way the vast majority of European people ate, lived, and farmed up 'til the Columbian exchange. The Mongols would have been instantly cognizable to anyone who saw the Hunnic incursions (or the Scythians, Pechenegs, Avars, Bolghars, Magyars or any other number of mounted steppe confederacies crashing into Europe from the east). Medieval black death? Meet the plague of Justinian. Most of the major political developments in pre-modern Europe had classical counterparts (if they weren't directly aping classical models - the Catholic church's parish system is a carryover from Roman secular organization), and the technology levels waffled around, with changes here and there but few true revolutions in material conditions.

Things have only really started going crazy in the last few hundred years, and yet even then people keep being eerily prescient about major technological and social developments (or maybe there was just something in the Star Trek writers' room's water).

The appearance of sameness across the years from 100 A.D. to 1600 are largely just a lack of detailed historical knowledge rather than anything meaningful.

As one random example: the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights. The invention of barrels, of particular metals, and fasteners, and construction methods. The Viking longship, that enables continuous travel from Iceland all the way to Byzantium in the 800's. The invention of double-entry accounting in the 1200's, etc etc. That's not even getting into social developments.

My historical knowledge isn't perfect, but there were massive advancements in things you don't even think about if you don't know the details. The deeper you look in the past, the more you start to realize the pace of change wasn't that different. This is especially true when you compare the change for the average person then to the change for the average person now. Sure computing was a big-deal of an invention but it took like what, 60 years before there was any meaningful impact to the average worker? Even longer, if you take into account the coworkers I've had who seem to have had no trouble retaining their positions despite being computer-illiterate.

Note that I'm not saying that the contemporary era isn't predictable, just that it's not really all that different from the speed of development in the past, with maybe a few exceptions. (Though frankly, I think even something as large as the Industrial Revolution is easily paralleled by the Agricultural Revolution.)

As one random example: the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights.

Quibbling here, but the saddle was invented before the stirrup in Central Asia at the latest sometime in the first millenium BC (with Assyrians known to use saddle-like things), while stirrups were invented later (2nd c. BC toe stirrup in India vs 2-4th c. AD foot stirrup in China). Both were invented in the classical period.

I guess that proves your point?

the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights.

The stirrup and saddle were important, yes, but the idea that the rich rode horses while the poor fought on foot is at least as old as Alexander's companion cavalry (who had neither stirrups nor advanced saddles). Similarly, political organization revolving around personal relationships between kings and subordinate networks of landholders who also owed military service doesn't arise with medieval "feudalism" (which itself isn't a unitary concept, because e.g. the French, English, and Polish models are so radically different) but was much, much older - the huscarl/fyrd system is similar, not reliant on mounted troops, and has antecedents back to classical Germanic tribes. Heck, even classical greco-roman hoplite/legionary systems are similar (though the Roman system diverged with the consolidation of agricultural land and then the marian reforms).

Developments in every day life did occur, and are interesting. But let's not lose the forest for the trees - it wasn't until first the Columbian exchange, and then the modern era, that there were true civilization-rocking material sea-changes.

Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews.

The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.

Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers.

Twenty Thousand Legues under the sea was 1870, from earth to the moon was written in 1865 (Jules Verne just rules), Ada Lovelace was dead for 20 years and the idea that we will have bombs that make even bigger bang was not far fetched.

But try and explain to someone in 1969 that 70 years later we won't be having any presence outside of the LEO.

Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers.

Yes, that one was a poor example. The person of 1870 would have rolled their eyes and gone "Oh you mean all those things the novelists are writing about right now?"

1870 was the year Verne published his follow-up to "From the Earth to the Moon", entitled Around the Moon. Stop me and say if any of this is sounding familiar from the moon missions of the 20th century:

Four days later, the crew of a US Navy vessel, Susquehanna, spots a bright meteor fall from the sky into the sea. This turns out to be the returning projectile. A rescue operation is assembled, intending to raise the capsule from a depth of 6096m (20,000 ft), using diving bells and steam-powered grappling claws. After several days of fruitless searches, all hope is lost and the rescue party heads home. On the way back, a lookout spots a strange shining buoy. Only then do the rescuers realize that the hollow aluminium projectile had positive buoyancy and thus must have surfaced after impact. The 'buoy' turns out to be the projectile and three men inside are found to be alive and well. They are treated to lavish homecoming celebrations as the first people to leave Earth.

The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.

I don't think it does by itself? persecutes is one of the most common relationships between groups, historically, so its presence doesn't tell us much.

No subjugation is most common. Persecution is a lot rarer because of its low ROI

The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.

The persecution of the Christians does seem to have been somewhat overstated by Christian authors, whose writing comes down to us with a bit of an agenda.

There was only ever really one concerted push to stamp out Christianity and that was under Diocletian. Before this point the persecution of Christians was largely sporadic and localised. Even when Diocletian actually tried to eradicate Christianity, enforcement was spotty and largely depended on the feelings of local officials.

To reduce the opinions of a vast number of people, living across several centuries, down to a sentence. The Romans did not feel threatened by Christianity, they found Christianity to be weird, alien and therefore unsettling.

If in 1814 you told a Russian soldier marching through the streets of Paris, or a French Senator signing the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, that 150 years hence half of Europe would be governed from Moscow, they might have find it quite conceivable. The history of the Russian Empire for decades prior had been one of constant expansion, and now they had defeated the most powerful empire in Europe. If in 1990 you told a white South African that 30 years of black rule would lead quickly to the abandonment of Mandela's professed principles, and their replacement by anarchy, national deterioration, and the codification of discrimination against non-black citizens, this too would have been quite conceivable - he had plenty of examples on the continent to consider.

These appeals to nuance and caution tend very often to be recipes for paralysis and the suspension of critical thinking, usually with the aim of avoiding drawing conclusions about the future that the appellant finds unsavory. Yes, certain radical events are impossible to predict. But it's futile to assume that some radical event is bound to happen that will make all future extrapolations suspect. Very often you can make reasonable predictions of what's going to happen in the future because you have decades or centuries of data regarding geopolitical conditions and human behavior to draw from, and I think those predictions are usually true. Obviously it gets shakier the further out into the future you go (I will never make any claims about what America is going to look like 200 years hence), but political arguments for a paltry few years or a couple of decades are perfectly fine.

Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.

They'd almost certainly be neither surprised nor happy about this, because the assumption would be that a nuclear war had taken place. People seem to have completely forgotten the grip that threat had on the culture around that time.

Good post. This kind of humility is a hallmark of classical liberal thinking. Such thinking has of course gone out of vogue lately.

First of all, historical examples are old enoigh to be from eras where the scientific method was rare, knowledge was limited to a few people, and I wouldn't expect anyone to predict the future well regardless of whether more modern people could.

Second, even your modern examples are chosen because they were the ones that turned out unpredictable. But that doesn't mean that the typical prediction would be incorrect.

There's also the question of who counts as making the prediction when people have different levels of knowledge. Some people did predict the fall of the Soviets, even if the man in the street didn't.

I disagree with the thesis. It might be hard at the moment to predict with precision when an empire will rise or fall, but the things that create strong civilizations are pretty well known.

A commitment to meritocracy, a strong work ethic, and (especially post-industrial revolution) a commitment to education are key cultural traits to develop. If you look at any of the countries that became powerful, you’ll find these things happening. The Germans lead Europe through having a highly educated population willing to work hard and actively promoted high achievers. They had electrified cities because they created a large crop of good engineers in their universities.

The second trait is entrepreneurial spirit. The ideal of a person having an idea, building it, and selling it. People adopting new technologies and using them to solve problems and do interesting things. And a state that mostly stays out of the way letting technology grow and develop. Americans, especially, excelled at this. If there was anything people wanted or needed, someone would invent it and sell it. And of course people were quick to adopt and adapt these gadgets to get things done.

A third would be self-confidence. Rising civilizations believe in themselves and their ideas. They are right and thus have the ambition to try to make a mark on the world. The Spanish never questioned their natural right to the New World. Britain didn’t wring her hands over whether or not it was right to conquer all their territories or to rule them as she saw fit. Britain of yesteryear saw absolutely nothing wrong with imposing her language, her ways, and her economic policies on the majority of the globe. China, in our era does much the same.

Even assuming that everything you say is true, it does not allow us to accurately predict whether or not country X will become an empire, for several reasons:

  1. Those things might be necessary for becoming an empire, but are they sufficient, alone on in combination? It seems clear that they are not. An obvious additional necessary element is demographics, for example. And of course, all sorts of external factors, such as the status of rivals.
  2. We don't know what level of meritocracy, or work ethic, or self-confidence, etc, is necessary.
  3. Even if we knew what level of each is necessary, we cannot accurately measure them.

I agree, but there are other elements which civilizations don't even recognize as key because they tended to always exist previously so there were few to no variations to use as data. For instance, above replacement fertility or an unchanging climate.

Surely we can see the difference between the predictions of leaders who say "if you give me $1M for 10% of the company, we will build new which fills and that will 100x" and "fascism will inevitably fall to liberalism for structural reasons"? OP is criticizing the latter, not the former.

You can argue "uber will succeed because it's better than taxis and because we can beat regulators" isn't true, but one could be convinced of that. Whereas "liberalism is the endpoint of all modern societies, no matter the historical contingency" ... there are a lot more ways that can go wrong.

And taking the particular case of startups - despite all being led by "visionary leaders", most startups fail! Everyone in the area is aware of that! Yet investment continues not because everyone involved is delusional and sheds the prison of rationality for the nobility of unconsidered self-sacrifice, but because computers and the internet enable successful startups to scale, meaning the big wins win very big, more than compensating for the losses on average. There aren't such visionary leaders in the restaurant space.

that recognition doesn't excuse you from having to do it anyway

But accurate predictions usually look like 'probably this and this if this, or maybe that if this, and this could all be wrong if that and that', not 'MY GLORIOUS PEOPLE WILL INEVITABLY TRIUMPH AND ASCEND TO THE HEAVENS'. Visionary leaders may have to lie about their confidence in success in public rhetoric, but in the process of success they take actions that demonstrate reasonable appraisals of the risk of failure. Your startup's idea is amazing, until you're pivoting and it wasn't so great (but the new one is great!)

Predicting the future is vital to civilization itself. Capitalists must predict the future to know what products to develop. NVIDIA's sudden providence wasn't an accident - Jensen Huang was working towards GPU-based AI development for about 20 years before it became apparent that this was a big deal.

Predicting the future over the very long term is very difficult. I don't know how anyone could predict where the best scientists will come from in 3530, or even what form they'll take. A soup of high energy plasma perhaps, or something more arcane? Even so, the Romans might well have predicted that Latin-speakers would make the discoveries and they wouldn't be wrong - Principia Mathematica was written in Latin. Yet that would have little meaning.

However, we can make predictions in the medium-term, when the world still functions roughly as we understand it. You can look at a country like China and say 'wow this country has high potential for growth, its population is Very Large and has a long history of civilization, plus there's plenty of coal... If they get richer and better organized...' That's a fact-based observation, which only needs a little analysis to become a conditional prediction.

Significant non-obvious predictions can be made and gotten right. Imagine if the US had been a little more thoughtful about what Chinese growth would do to their superpower standing back in 1989 or 1990, after Tiananmen square. Or at the latest in 1996, after the 3rd Straits Crisis (what clearer sign could they ask for about the fundamental attitude of the Party). Suppose they'd tried to predict what Chinese leaders would do, given that the US had made it perfectly clear that they planned to undermine the rule of the Party via economic liberalization and the free flow of ideas... Would they not try to cut off foreign political ideas but keep the wealth? Grow stronger and then seek to challenge US hegemony in Asia, like any world power seeking to control their own region against an ideological enemy?

Or take NATO expansion in Eastern Europe. A fair few said it would lead to disaster, George Kennan for instance (who is not the biggest Russophile in the world) in 1997:

[P]erhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Lo and behold, we got nationalistic, anti-Western tendencies in Russian opinion, a Cold War and unfriendly Russian foreign policy. Medium-term predictions aren't easy but they can regularly be made and done right, it all depends on the competence of those who make predictions. There was a whole chorus of people who predicted the Iraq War would be a disaster and they were right too.

One might counter with the 'Japan is the greatest challenge to US in the Pacific' camp in the 1980s but these people were very very stupid. Japan obviously didn't have the energy or materials (or even the food security) to challenge the US, or the population size, or the military-industrial base, or the nationalistic foundation in internal ideology... This isn't hindsight but things that could easily be observed at the time. Even if Japanese economic growth continued at 1980s rates it couldn't challenge the US without taking a huge chunk of South East Asia. And Japan couldn't take a huge chunk of South East Asia unless it challenges the US.

The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

He was right that it would turn Russia against the West; he was wrong that it would be "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era". He was expecting a new Cold War that might possibly escalate into WW3, while the US has barely been affected by the current war. Kennan, having spent most of his career with Russia as a peer of the US, could not conceive how much Russia would degenerate and how little of a threat it would pose.

If Russia's nuclear arsenal isn't a threat, what is?

The US has very much been affected by this war (Europe far more so). Aside from inflation, stocks of munitions have been greatly depleted. It turns out that GDP is not sufficient for producing artillery shells, Stingers or Javelins in sufficient numbers to supply a medium-high intensity war. Factories and machine tools are what the US needed, what they're scrambling to put together.

Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the US digging out dregs from fifty years ago - Hawk missiles were pretty good in 1970 but are somewhat desultory now: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4944652

Nor would the US MIC be outperformed by Russia in shell production: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/long-war-in-ukraine-highlights-need-for-u-s-army-to-modernize-ammo-production

“So we’re doing five times less than they do and trying to keep it up. But if we don’t start the production lines, if you don’t warm it up, it is going to be a huge problem,” Ustinova said.

Furthermore, a new Cold War that might escalate into WW3 is precisely what we have. That's the China-US conflict in the Pacific. Pushing Russia towards China was possibly the biggest and most braindead mistake the US has made.

You make a very good point about how it is often possible to successfully predict in the medium term, but generally impossible to predict in the long term.

Many of your hypotheticals about how the future could have been successfully predicted are probably examples where emotion overruled cold logical analysis. Kennan's insights seem obvious in retrospect, but he was not listened to. I guess that maybe the ideological urge to expand the Western system and/or the "we're on a roll now" urge to keep expanding NATO's hard power overruled such considerations.

It is possible that we overestimate how often such accurate predictions were actually made in the past and how easy it is to make accurate predictions because in hindsight, we give extra attention to the people who were proved right.

True, hindsight bias is a pain.

expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

This conflates two things:

  1. A prediction of how NATO expansion will affect Russian behavior; and
  2. A statement that said Russian response means that NATO expansion would be bad policy.

We actually don't know whether or not policy makers disagreed with #1. They might well have agreed with #1, but not with #2. And we do not know whether #2 is true, and cannot say whether it is, unless we assess the benefits of expansion, including the avoidance of the effects of a failure to expand, none of which you mention. Finally, re #2, as Zhou Enlai probably didn't say, it is too soon to tell. (Heck, if Russia's current policy re Ukrainian grain exports causes food inflation and results in Biden losing the election, most people here will consider NATO expansion a very good thing indeed).

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Note that it assumes that letting Russia to recolonize Ukraine, Baltics, Poland would give a superior results.

The problem with Russia is that after conquering Poland it would start demanding demilitarization of Germany and talk about legitimate security interests.

To me this invokes the phrase of human actions if not human designs. There are so many different variables whereby action X leads to Y, or Z, or A, , or BBB.

Not to side track your conversation but this is why a centralized system will always fail over the long run. What you need are numerous bets; not one bet. Because no matter how educated the position the key to understanding is knowing that we don’t know anything.

I find these debates to be mainly definitional. "Difficulty predicting" is not the same as looking at trends and extrapolating outwards.

Knowing specifically that it would be South Carolina that would be the first to announce secession from the United States is inherently predictable: Based on pure odds, there were only N states at the time which practiced slavery to the extent that they were embroiled in the conflict over ownership of other human beings and whether the central government had the right to enforce such a dramatic societal change. But, with further information about the state senators and leading up politics- which states were the ones that were the loudest and most informed in the senatorial debates provides enough information to make a prediction.

When would it happen, and how would it happen, including some of the broad strategies the south would employ would likely have been predictable to a person who followed the newspaper.

What's difficult is the "by this date, X will happen", and only fools enter into specifics. You simply have to have the foresight to ask the question. Therefore, I don't find your argument compelling. By reframing the argument, we miss the cases where someone comes close enough that they may as well have been correct.

Communism was a motivating ideology that led toward revolution in general. Therefore, assuming an existing powerful monarchy would fall to communism, and after 200 years of monarchism's powers continually being peeled back in Europe seems simple enough. It's not difficult to imagine someone somewhere, predicting the Tzars falling to communism, were they properly informed, given the preconditions: They know about communism, recent history (the prior 100 years at least), and can look outward at what societies are unhappy with their existing setups.

Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews.

That's what they want you to think. But there's a some amount of evidence Christianity is just disguised Imperial Cult that went a bit astray. Of course we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.

See:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-mark-antony-2-parallel

So, Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans, although they kind of fumbled it at the end by not managing to deprecate the old testament entirely.

That article is the lowest form of conspirational thinking.

Caesar went north into Gallia; Jesus went north into Galilee.

Caesar went to SPAin to cleanse it of pompeian forces; Jesus went to a SPA to cleanse his feet.

This is the equivalent of "American historians in the 19th century noticed they had no Great Military Leader for the Revolution, so they copied the Duke of Wellington and instead called him George Washington".

WASH-ING-TON, WELL-ING-TON, I mean they're practically the same name! And you WASH with water that you get from a WELL. Could they have made it any clearer?

There are so many plums to pluck out of it, like the following:

It may also be notable that the dove was a symbol of Venus, and plays a prominent role in Christian symbolism.

Sparrows were also symbols of Venus, more so than doves. And didn't Jesus say something about sparrows?

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Caesar had an infamous love affair with Cleopatra, widely regarded by Romans as a whorish seductress; Jesus had an affair with the prostitute Mary Magdalene.

Our boy is clearly not up on scholarship which denies that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, how un-feminist of him! 😁

He also contradicts his own point, where he says something, adds a quote to demonstrate it, and doesn't see that the quote doesn't say what he just said:

His funeral, however, was rather interesting. Mark Antony had a wax effigy of Caesar created, in the pose in which Caesar had been found dead, wounds and all, which for the purposes of display was affixed to a cross together with his bloody robes. The effigy was raised in front of the crowd so that the plebs could see for themselves what had been done to their champion. Antony was a showman that way. From Appian (amusingly, at the link, it says the translation was done by none other than John Carter):

When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar - the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face. This sight seemed so pitiful to the people that they could bear it no longer. Howling and lamenting, they surrounded the senate-house, where Caesar had been killed, and burnt it down, and hurried about hunting for the murderers, who had slipped away some time previously.

There's nothing there about bloody robes or the effigy being affixed to a cross (certainly not, the cross was a shameful method of execution for slaves and the worst criminals, you're not going to put your murdered hero on a cross) but "a mechanical device" used to raise it up because it couldn't be seen as it lay on the bier.

He covers himself by saying it was a tropaeum and then illustrates it by a really dumb picture (famously balding and vain about it Caesar with long hair in the wax effigy?) which is a repurposed version of a crucifix:

The mechanical device in question was a tropaeum, a cruciform device on which things were hung for display. Caesar was known for showing off his various war trophies on tropaea, and often placed the device on his coinage, to the degree that tropaea became symbolically associated with him

Wikipedia has a handy article on this, and depictions of historical tropaions. While they might (and I emphasise might) have hung Caesar's bloody garments on such, they wouldn't have done the same with an effigy. Because tropaions were trophies, indicating the conquest and vanquishing of an enemy. Putting up the clothing, much less the funeral effigy, would have been annoucing "Caesar has been beaten by his victorious enemies". It would be like using images of George Floyd for BLM marches depicting him sitting on the toilet: not the associations you want to invoke in the outraged onlookers.

"But wouldn't Caesar's bloody garments be like the photos of Floyd with Chauvin kneeling on him? Wouldn't that show the same 'he was murdered unjustly' imagery to get the mob up in arms?" Perhaps, but the associations of trophies is probably too strong - it would be showing 'Caesar was killed rightly as a just punishment and is a loser', which is not what Antony wanted.

Anyway, see for yourself: compare John Carter's alleged "Reconstruction of Caesar’s wax effigy, hanging on a tropaeum, as it would have appeared at his funeral" with what genuine ancient Roman depictions of tropaeum look like, and judge for yourself. That's not even getting into the history of depictions of the crucifixion, which would have come much later.

(God damn it, anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and five feckin' minutes on Google can do the work, this is why I rant and rave about historical illiteracy).

EDIT: We have Suetonius' account, where he says that the robe was hung on a pillar:

When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near the tomb of Julia1, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix; within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain.

There's the account by Appian, which John Carter quotes for the wax effigy, which again tells us about the bloody robe, this time it is Mark Antony who puts in on a pole and waves it about:

Then, swept very easily on to passionate emotion, he stripped the clothes from Caesar's body, raised them on a pole and waved them about, rent as they were by the stabs and befouled with the dictator's blood.

Appian then goes on to the part about the wax effigy and the mechanical device, but as I said, I'm not convinced this was a tropaeum or anything that looked like a body on a cross.

we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.

People who insist on their harebrained pet theories as UNTHINKABLE to those obviously small-minded people they live alongside are an incredible tedious lot. Academia historians talk about minute details and obscure theories all the time. Constantly. They don't stop. The degree to which they dig into minute things honestly scares me, occasionally. If they aren't collectively convinced by one guy's substack posts, consider that they are unconvinced for a reason, and that it isn't because they just are too brainwashed by the man to see the REAL truth.0

Academia historians talk about minute details and obscure theories all the time. Constantly. They don't stop.

There's a difference between 'minute detail' and 'most everything we've been taking to be true' is BS. E.g. there's a hell of a lot of controversy with something as 'minute' as hellenic influence on the old testament.

Admitting you've overlooked something of this importance, even if the reasons were obvious is on completely another level.

If they aren't collectively convinced by one guy's substack posts

It's not "one guy's substack post", it's an entire book. The substack presents a slightly modified version of the theory.

See ~the public lecture of the book's author, Francesco Carotta.

https://www.carotta.de/subseite/echo/tumult-e.html

I started in on your John Carter (John Carter - JC - more of the secret conspiracy uncovered!) post and skipped out at this part:

This camp will note that, outside of the gospels themselves – which can’t really be taken as historical documents, given the incredible events narrated within – there is no credible historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ. There are a couple of paragraphs in Josephus and Tacitus, sure, but these are obvious fabrications given that they’re inserted without rhyme or reason in the middle of otherwise coherent narratives, and are written in entirely different styles from those of the putative authors. Essentially, at some point in the past some monk or other was reading through old historical records and said, ah shit, there’s nothing in here about Jesus, people might take that as a reason to doubt! And then proceeded to get out his quill pen and make up the data to fit the model.

Guy is a bog-standard Jesus Mythicist, nothing to see here folks, there's enough rebuttal elsewhere of the loony-tunes.

Now, Carotta: the idea is not as batshit insane as it may sound, because we have an example of something like this happening - the Buddha re-imagined as a Christian saint.

But the rationale for turning a recognised historical Roman into a Jew isn't at all convincing. The Jews were despised, why on earth would you make your great national hero into one of the conquered and inferior peoples? This would be like swapping out George Washington for Benedict Arnold.

Okay, so if the Romans had no reason to turn Caesar into a Jew, turn it around; maybe the Jews (or a small cult of them) wanted to improve things for their people by having a god modelled on Caesar that would appeal to the Romans and ensure they got better treatment.

How did that work out with the sack of Jerusalem and the persecution of Christians within the Empire?

As for "[Caesar's] character shares many of the personality traits associated with Jesus – most notably the strong emphasis on mercy, and the over-riding concern with the welfare of the poor".

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

The guy that the following anecdote is told about, had a strong emphasis on mercy? When he was twenty-five and on his way to study oratory in Rhodes, a little diversion of his journey happened:

In 75 BCE, Julius Caesar was captured by Cilician pirates, who infested the Mediterranean sea. The Romans had never sent a navy against them, because the pirates offered the Roman senators slaves, which they needed for their plantations in Italy. As a consequence, piracy was common.

In chapter 2 of his Life of Julius Caesar, Greek author Plutarch of Chaeronea (46-c.120) describes what happened when Caesar encountered the pirates. The translation below was made by Robin Seager.

[2.1] First, when the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar burst out laughing. They did not know, he said, who it was that they had captured, and he volunteered to pay fifty.

[2.2] Then, when he had sent his followers to the various cities in order to raise the money and was left with one friend and two servants among these Cilicians, about the most bloodthirsty people in the world, he treated them so highhandedly that, whenever he wanted to sleep, he would send to them and tell them to stop talking.

[2.3] For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner.

[2.4] He also wrote poems and speeches which he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged. They were much taken with this and attributed his freedom of speech to a kind of simplicity in his character or boyish playfulness.

[2.5] However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them.

[2.6] He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into the prison at Pergamon. He then went in person to [Marcus] Junius, the governor of Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners.

[2.7] Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case. Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined that he was joking.

"By the way, when I'm free, I'm going to execute the lot of you" versus "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do". Yes, the resemblance is uncanny.

he Jews were despised, why on earth would you make your great national hero into one of the conquered and inferior peoples? This would be like swapping out George Washington for Benedict Arnold.

No. You make up a historical figure of theirs , or embellish the tale of some historical figure with properties of your cultic hero, and then these guys are unknowingly worshipping someone they'd much prefer to hate. It's liek the best form of joke, and a useful one if it includes such messages as 'obey the secular authorities, pay your taxes, you'll get your due in the next world'.. .

What do you say about points from 20. onward at the https://www.carotta.de/subseite/echo/tumult-e.html#bronnen

?

Cilician pirates

Mercy

..we were talking about pirates, mind you. Which is a form of long-running organised armed robbery. Was Jesus ever stressing the need to be merciful to people whose way of life was based on preying on others ?

39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. 41 And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. 42 Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans

Yeah, sure, that really works out, given the support of the Hasmodeans by the Romans. They invented a new religion to convert the Jews. Instead of, you know, stomping all over them as per usual practice when conquering a new province.

Excuse me while I stoop down to pick up my eyeballs, they fell out of their sockets after rolling too hard.

I was really hoping he wasn’t channeling Joseph Atwill’s thesis. It’s a historical conclusion that’s ‘very’ far reaching and implausible.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

A hero character who loves the poor isn’t that uncommon, in fact Buddha fits this fairly well too. Buddha is a prince who essentially renounced his throne to become a religious aesetic. He had disciples, was a traveling preacher, and so on. So you can put this “character” onto both Jesus and Buddha and if memory serves Krishna as well.

As to the specific events, they only fit if you take very vague descriptions of the events themselves. Jesus was Baptized in the Jordan, he wasn’t crossing as a conqueror. Jesus didn’t just say “don’t be scared,” he calmed the storm. The Sanhedrin had mostly theological disputes with Jesus, and not that he was looking to establish a kingdom or something.

The other part is that Jesus is very interested (mostly in Mathew, though he teaches the Law in other places) in Judaism itself. The Shema quote (this is the most important credal statement in Judaism— Hear Oh Israel, the Lord year God, the Lord is One), concerns over Jewish temple sacrifices, and the Jewish Sabbath are things that just don’t fit. Roman’s were polytheistic and their sacrifices were not identical to Jewish sacrifices, and Romans don’t keep any sort of Sabbath. It simply doesn’t make sense to insert Jewish ideas into the mouth of a character invented to absorb the imperial cult.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

You're telling me that Julius Caesar and Jesus both just happen to have crossed a river at some point in their lives? That's stretching it too far to be a coincidence, it must be a secret code.

My God, we're overlooking the most obvious piece of evidence literally staring us in the face!

JC!

JC - Julius Caesar/Jesus Christ.

They told us what they were doing right from the start!

If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

Try it.

Did you never hear of folktale classification? This is breaking down story elements into what we'd now call tropes which are commonly shared by different stories from different places. It's how Jung gets his notion of the Collective Unconscious and the Archetypes:

A quantitative study, published by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani in 2016, tried to evaluate the time of emergence for the "Tales of Magic" (ATU 300–ATU 749), based on a phylogenetic model. They found four of them to belong to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stratum of magic tales:

ATU 328 The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure (= Jack and the Beanstalk and Thirteen)

ATU 330 The Smith and the Devil (KHM 81a)

ATU 402 The Animal Bride (= The Three Feathers, KHM 63 and The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat, KHM 106)

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals (= The White Snake, KHM 17 and The Queen Bee, KHM 62)

There's an entire cottage industry from the 19th century of dismissing Christianity as just another Middle Eastern mystery cult (the dying and resurrected saviour motif from Osiris to Dionysius), as well as the valiant attempts of Frazer and others to reduce all mythology ultimately to the Solar Myth and fertilty myths. Comparative religion is the field for "hey DAE the resemblances between X and Y?"

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

...Girard's "grievances" against The Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that the New Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation."

We also get 19th ethnographers trying to classify 'primitive' beliefs according to that sort of schema, and the euhemerists culminating in the philogist Max Müller and his famous phrase that "mythology is a disease of language":

He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is "a disease of language". By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view, "gods" began as words constructed to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word "Dyaus", which he understood to imply "shining" or "radiance". This leads to the terms "deva", "deus", "theos" as generic terms for a god, and to the names "Zeus" and "Jupiter" (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking was later explored similarly by Nietzsche.

Someone already did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coincidences_urban_legend

Here you go.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats