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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35167 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Biden: Pandemic is over

Of course, for all important purposes, pandemic has been over in most of the Western world for most of this year - ie. sure, there's a disease going around, but the "pandemic mentality" is gone, and so have at least the most visible and onerous restrictions - but this sort of a declaration, offhand and qualified as it is, seems like a point in the general development.

It's already evident in social media that COVID doomers - the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions etc. - are angry and frustrated, as they've been for months, but I also wonder how the sort of "reverse doomers" who declared a year ago that Western world is never going to declare the pandemic over and give up restrictions, either out of stupidity or out of a malignant conspiracy, are interpreting it.

Honestly it's shocking how sticky some of this stuff is, even if the vast majority of people have just moved on with their lives.

Got asked to take a RAT test to attend a 29th birthday celebration in which nobody is immunocompromised or over 30. Some people just seem to want to live in COVID zero mode forever.

High status respected people have to lead and these people will follow. Once the avocado toast people can be sure that being unworried about covid doesn't mean you're a Nazi or Qanon or anti-science guy, they will go along. At this point some are still very afraid of being seen as part of that "misinfo" cluster if they aren't worried about covid enough, the cluster that includes things like climate change denial, Russia stuff, etc. But once it's announced that The Science now actually says XYZ, they will accept it too. They are just taking a bit longer, like that Japanese soldier on that island who "fought" WWII even decades after it ended.

the avocado toast people

My sides

My take on this has always been that there'll be some skewering movie that comes out in 5-10 years about this period, and it'll mark the quiet transition of intelligentsia opinion into a 'Iraq WMDs' kind of an issue in which everybody pretends they secretly didn't believe all along.

This just amplifies the important of archiving to prevent intelligentsia memory-holing their past statements. At the very least they should publicly rebuke their past selves, not merely pretend they disagreed all along.

But let's not be magnanimous when it's not warranted.

The sheer extent of social and economic destruction all around the Western world caused by long-term lockdowns will probably remain incalculable for years to come, provided that anyone even dares to calculate it. Will anyone have the courage to hold the feet of avocado toast people to the fire for what they have supported?

The whole point of being high status is power without responsibility; nobody gets to hold their feet to the fire, they get to define where the fire is and whose feet are to be held to it.

The sheer extent of social and economic destruction all around the Western world caused by long-term lockdowns will probably remain incalculable for years to come, provided that anyone even dares to calculate it. Will anyone have the courage to hold the feet of avocado toast people to the fire for what they have supported?

I listen to the BBC's daily news podcast -- which could be the mouthpiece of the World Avocado Toast Forum -- and at some point in the last week or so there was a report about how some third-world region's economy had been devastated "by COVID." It's not the first time I've heard it put like this, and it always makes me vomit in my mouth a little: attributing the mal effects of oppressive lockdown regimes to the disease rather than the politicians/bureaucracies who chose against other options. This is going to be the narrative going forward.

From the old place:

Single-cause fallacy

Media articles are quick to describe negative second-order side effects as having been caused "by the pandemic", when the effects in question clearly have no causal relationship to the Covid-19 virus whatsoever and are exclusively caused by the measures instated in reaction to the virus (including lockdowns). [By way of analogy, it would be very misleading to claim that cancer causes baldness. Chemotherapy causes baldness, and chemotherapy is used in response to cancer, but it is not the cancer itself which causes the baldness.] This is an abdication of responsibility, as it tacitly assumes that governments had no choice but to instate lockdowns, restrictions and other measures in response to the virus - when in fact they did have a choice, and the policy decisions they actually made should be expected to pass a cost-benefit analysis, just the same as every other government policy.

Note that if governments can't be held to account for the negative effects of lockdowns/restrictions because their hands were forced, this obviously implies that they can't take credit for the benefits of these policies either.

Personally, I'd consider "being sure the right lessons are learned" to be more important than "making sure the right people are punished," if I had to choose between them. If we settle into a narrative of "the Bad Thing happened because of the Bad People," and not because of Bad Decisions or Bad Behaviors that really made the difference, we can fall into the trap of believing that, so long as none of the people around bear the marks-of-shame tribal-signifiers of the Bad People, we are incapable of repeating their mistakes. And if any such mistakes are made, why then, it must be because of Secret Bad People who were lurking among us! They must be found and killed!

I do not want to lose sight of the fact that I could be an avocado toast person the next go-round. Hopefully avoiding complacency will help me stay on the right path.

But learning the right lessons implies learning from mistakes and admitting them.

But high status respected people have led. Both implicitly - how often do you see masks worn by people on the telly? - and explicitly, like Biden did just here, or numerous "pandemic influencers" have done in recent months.

I've seen some people lump all mask-wearers, Covid-doomers etc. to some "sheeple" category of people who just do what they're told and follow trends, but the trend-following normies have actually ditched the masks and social distancing a long time ago. This remnant really consists of true believers who don't follow the trends and often actually adopted Covid distancing measures before they became the social norm; in many ways they at least can consider themselves equally headstrong and dissident types as the Covid skeptics do, or have done.

Of course "normie"/"contrarian" is a sliding scale, many of them will probably eventually succumb to the social pressure, just as many Covid skeptics did - but still, it's different than described here.

This remnant really consists of true believers who don't follow the trends and often actually adopted Covid distancing measures before they became the social norm

I strongly doubt that. Nancy Pelosi went hugging people in a Chinatown on Feb. 24, Trump called Covid "a hoax" (not really, but) on Feb. 29 or so and that was when "the social norm" started its rapid 180 turn. Check out this reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/worstof/comments/i1x87n/in_which_ramitheasshole_scolds_and_mocks_a_mother/

The maskers I see where I work are only about 5% of everyone. I see them as hardcore redguards. I know that they will likely be among those who interrogate me a few years from now before sending me to the gulag.

The Covid episode is mostly passed for now but the radicalized among us remain like sleeper agents, ready to coerce us into ever more experimental medical treatments at the slightest pretext.

I understand the anger, I feel a lot of it myself. But this is too boo-outgroupy and inflammatory for what is supposed to be a discussion group. This isn't a place to vent, it is a place to discuss, and you should speak as if everyone is reading/listening.

You are assuming “everyone” is just the Americans here. Many places around the world (ranging from most of Asia and Latin America to Germanic/Francophone Europe to former white British colonies) had experiences with covid which very much justify that depiction. Indefinite house(or proper) arrest, and mass firings of people not going along with the hysteria was a reality less than a year ago. There was a very credible possibility that even worse would come, as anyone who saw the news coverage in places like Austria could easily deduct.

Not sure how inflammatory it is compared to just describing reality... Australia had quarantine camps and Canada as well had guarded mandatory "hotels"... wasn't even for confirmed cases, you could test negative but if you met requirements (daring to leave the country while unvaxxed, filling out a form wrong) you actually were physically detained without trial.

Contracts were awarded to build vastly more expansive versions of these COVID prisons, the conspiracists weren't making up the contracts and the preparations... they were just always pork contracts for the politically connected or the governments were forced to back off by the political push-back.

Its incredibly difficult to state just how much true totalitarianism was implemented in the name of COVID restrictions and how many people were demanding that they be expanded to truly horrific extents.

Canada mandated a phone app to leave and reenter the country and for a while pursued regulatory reprisals against those who deleted the app. People were calling for the fines and prison terms to be applied to everyone who tried to reenter the country without downloading the app.

I'm merely describing my lived experience.

Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism? There have always been some germaphobes and neurotics and hypochondriacs etc.

But yes, I agree that most people have moved on. It was first Ukraine but by now it seems to be climate/sustainability (Greta style) again, flight shaming etc. Also tied to the energy crisis in Europe. There's less bandwidth available for boring old stuff like covid with these new things coming up.

Contrarianism is probably the wrong term here, I just used it because I couldn't think of anything better on the spot.

The "zero-covidianism" is more like a honestly held ideology at this point. It's a new ideology, to be sure, still in the process of formation, but every ideology must be new at one point. We'll see how it sticks - the main point was still that it's not just normie "go-with-the-flow" thinking, these people are not going with the flow at the moment, and most likely never conceptualized it like the "flow" was what they were a part of.

For instance, local hardcore zero-covidists have, throughout the crisis, maintained that the Finnish government never truly wanted to fight Covid, that it was willing to let kids get long Covid (since Finland only had school closured for two months in 2020 and never after that), that the local health authorities are in thrall to Great Barrington Declaration, want to copy Sweden, believe in "herd immunity" etc. From that perspective, it would be easy to believe that it's just you and your pals trying your damndest to combat the mainstream ideology, which is "Feh, we'll only combat Covid when we are absolutely pushed to do so and want to return to "normality" as fast as possible", and the anti-maskers and anti-lockdowners are just a particularly loud and unpleasant version of this mainstream ideology.

Yeah, but are there many such people who keep at it out of contrarianism?

I don't think so. I think this is just the way public health people are. The entire culture of public health is about pushing for marginal improvements in expected longevity across large populations, which often means recommending things that look pretty silly on an individualized basis (e.g. the CDC admonishing against over easy eggs). It seems to me that this culture of pursuing some value of "health" at the population level is chosen by people that have a particularly neurotic bent to begin with and that the localized cultures at these institutions continues to push the internal logic of it, to the point where quite a few people in the profession really will refuse rare beef or feel that sunscreen is a strict requirement for going outside.

Of course, it doesn't escape my notice that quite a few people in the industry are obviously unhealthy at a glance, but the cognitive dissonance of that never seems to bother people all that much.

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