I'm glad in hindsight more people are willing to see the problems of groupthink in this period, but I do hope they look inward and hold themselves responsible too, and maybe next time not defer to authority and demonize others so willingly.
Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you or me can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that they willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise with a smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that things didn’t escalate to violence.
I mean for Christ sake, we have phone numbers people could call to rat out their neighbors family birthday party. We had police kicking kids and arresting people for using a playground. All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing. People I thought I knew and respected completely lost their damn minds. Many have yet to recover.
What these “experts” did to society is beyond the pale. Humans may have fancy shiny tools and “science” but we are fundamentally the same superstitious creatures as those who came before us 10’s of thousands of years ago.
Yes, violence was largely avoided. But it was still an extremely harmful period of time.
It should be a constant reminder to each of us that we are not special and we are not different - we could and very well may be whipped into a similar frenzy someday.
The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience, or to simply virtue-signal their contrariness to their clan.
And the US treated these attackers with kid gloves. There were pretty much no enforcement of any of the things the complainers were complaining about: No consequences for ignoring stay-at-home mandates. Few localities actually enforced business closures. Masking was up to individual businesses to enforce, resulting in little compliance. Throughout the pandemic, I could drive 50 miles in any direction from my city and find people out and about, maskless, businesses open, no measures being taken at all. The only thing that was actually enforced were school closures, and that's only because schools are run by the government.
Those two years ushered in this new era of consequence-free mass civil disobedience. And it wasn't even in service of anything--just performative contrariness.
I guess intelligence agencies also learned the sad answer to the question "If there were a grave threat to society, is it possible to use PsyOps to get society to ignore or even prolong it?" But then again, I suppose our reaction to Climate Change has already answered that question.
Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.
The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.
I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.
I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.
On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.
You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").
Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.
You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.
Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration, victim complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was pulled out, every tactic was tried.
Like when Ron DeSantis was called a murderer for opening Florida's beaches (when it was well established that outside activities were extremely safe), or when parents advocating for schools to open were called white supremacists (when the predictable result of closing schools was that poor and minority students suffered most)?
The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience
Meanwhile, I learned how many people are willing to have governments literally lock everyone in their homes because of their inability to do any sort of rational risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis.
Lockdowns, and the labeling of society into "essential" and "non-essential", occurred nearly everywhere with no debate at all.
The most basic freedoms guaranteed to us - the freedom of movement, association, free speech - were taken away from hundreds of millions of people who had literally no say in the matter.
What world were you living in where these restrictions were only nominal? They literally roped off certain sections of businesses preventing people from buying non-essential products. It was everywhere.
"Politicized" is a funny word. When people talk about "democratizing" something, it is all "everyone's voices must be heard!" and "we all come together!" and sunshine and rainbows.
But when ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives try to use the political process to effect policy—supposedly the essence of "democracy," as I was taught in grade school… "How dare you politicize this issue! Stupid peasants, don't you know you are supposed to blindly follow every diktat of our unelected expert class! The nerve, to think government is supposed to be responsive to your desires"
If ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives are all clambering to remove those limits during times of turmoil, we absolutely have a right to decry politics crossing a line it was never meant to cross.
My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."
The "public health experts" are not angels of God, infallible messengers of Reality itself come down from Heaven to deliver the Gospel Of The Science to an unworthy populace. They are fallible human beings, they made many mistakes and their priorities don't always align with everyone else's. The inalienable rights of man, as re-affirmed in the First Amendment, give everyone the right to worship whomever they wish however they wish; I am therefore free to deny Saint Anthony of Bethesda's divinity as loudly and publicly as I desire.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed this review of it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
Cloth masks and social distancing did not seem to slow the spread. Some people who got fully vaxed and boosted got sick and are still getting sick. None of that stuff effectively protected people, and it caused harms. Those with at-risk medical conditions (maybe you) should take care of themselves by isolating to avoid those busses.
Since day 1 this thing was 99% killing older people or people with 3 or 4 comorbidities. Dont try to turn it into the black plague now.
Behind every comment is an actual person with a valid opinion. I may not agree with it, but perspective is key.
Some have said you learn the most listening to a critic/skeptic
And then there was this plan from 2019: "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...
1) "We need a no fly zone over Ukraine
and somehow not connecting the dots to that meaning
2) NATO jets shooting down Russian jets
which in turn leads to
3) A hot war with between nuclear powers
something that hasn't happened outside of a few border skirmishes between India and Pakistan
The question is: what public health policies will minimize harm according to some set of metrics, and what will those metrics be?
The harms you describe are real. But you offer no way to quantify these harms against the harms that may have occured without the policies you are objecting to.
Gina Carano was fired from Star Wars for making that same comparison - not even denying COVID, just saying, "the holocaust happened because people turned against their neighbors".
A few hours of lecture about the Cambodian genocide should be sufficient though. We need to focus more on the Holocaust specifically; that's the important genocide and the rest can safely be treated as footnotes in history.
/s
He appears to be surmising that we're becoming very impulsive in quashing whatever thought appears to impede our immediate policy goals--not that it is the Holocaust in and of itself that is special. (He even goes through the effort of explicitly highlighting it as entirely feasible for a populace to fall to!)
I have watched many films on the holocaust, and they were quite sad, and tragic.
However, I did not truly understand some of the why until I happened across the German Revolution of 1918–1919 [1] ; organizations, and elites, that played significant roles in the Revolution were the very same that were proscribed with the rise of the Nazis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...
Everyone would take up the exact same position they had, there will be a little attrition either side. Rabble on the internet all day long.
FEAR was made into a VIRTUE. The good people were afraid and did what they were supposed to do. The bad people vote wrong and we don’t listen to them anyhow. Same thing if we play it back.
The problem with both is we're talking "sides" and not "what should we do based on what we know?" There were far too many politicians involved, and they were all more concerned with appearing to be doing something on our behalf than actually acting in our best interests.
Consider why fear was made into a virtue. You said it, “our best interests“, then look at the lens of Covid, and define that. Who got to say with that exactly was? Can you see any scenario where “Considering who the virus effects, doing nothing special is our best long term approach” would have come out of the government and media?
There may be an argument that if Covid was either more deadly or less deadly it would have had less of an effect.
Mine Safety Health Administration advice was to stay home when sick and then business as usual. I was on mine sites when others were locked at home double-masked with fear. Nobody was masked on mine sites because it restricts visibility and is unsafe. Do you think MSHA is a fringe group?
OSHA tried to mandate masks and shots. It was ridiculous to watch the disparity in responses and fear.
MSHA sites are dangerous yet are safe. The OSHA approach was incorrect.
It takes an incredible amount of privilege to support the Covid mitigations. Consider that not a single person who enacted them missed a single paycheck because of the mandates. I imagine that holds true to most of the people cheering those mandates on or calling them “minor inconveniences”. A lot of privilege needs to be checked here.
What kinds of unknowns would justify, in your mind, those sorts of policies?
So what do you think your threshold is? If a new airborne transmitted disease with a 30% kill rate showed up, would centralized public health policies be OK?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Precisely which groups would be isolated from "young people", and which would not, and on what basis? Do you judge the 44k deaths in the 40-49 cohort (likely parents of older children, along with teachers of many children) to be acceptable? Do you believe that an increase in their death count due to leaving children unrestricted would also be acceptable? Just how would not locking down kids work?
Absolutely disgusting how many so-called “smart rational” people dismissed it… as if Covid was literally the only thing that mattered and anybody who pointed it out was nothing more than a Fox News watching selfish asshole.
To this day people will defend letting people die alone in a hospital or nursing home with only some crappy video conference as a substitute for real human contact.
It takes a special kind of monster to support the crap we did to the elderly. There are a worryingly large set of people I used to respect that turned out to be monsters.
That's exactly the dehumanizing language that was used about people who were skeptical of lockdowns and other dissidents.
I think they were normal people who were overcome with fear and placed too much trust in authority. Weak-minded, perhaps, but that doesn't make them monsters.
So I ask again, what would the circumstances have to be for "letting the at risk people decide for themselves" to be an unacceptable policy? What fatality level, transmission mechanism or whatever would have to be present for you to accept that some sort of centralized public health policy was required?
1M americans died of COVID-19. That's a real threat, too. So the difference with Ebola is not really to do with the "reality" of the threat, but the manner and rapidity of death, along with the fatality rate.
> If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable
I do not see how you can draw this conclusion.
I agree with you, but we did worse actually.
Some states actually sequestered covid positive patients, and covid suspected cases at nursing homes with highly at risk populations.
We know who covid kills: People with advanced age and multiple comorbidities. The same type of folks you find at nursing homes.
Those governors that did that - in my mind they are guilty of murder.
For those of you that want to fact check this, I will save you the trouble.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/08/cuomo-sent-6300-covid-19-patie...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/9000-covid-patie...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/five-governors-cuomo...
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/06/16/michiga...
https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/whitmer-orders...
https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/murphy-administration-ign...
FLATTEN THE CURVE
> All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing.
That's quite the leap, and frankly reads as self-affirming speculation (e.g. I was right, and the proof is in this fantasy).
"The Post originally described Cotton’s remarks as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” in a February 2020 article. But last week, The Post rewrote the article’s headline, softening “conspiracy theory” to “fringe theory” and noting that scientists have “disputed” it rather than “debunked” it."
[1]"The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections — and serious new reporting." Washington Post, 6/10/21
Unfortunately, this is a common tactic. Walking back a previous wrong assertion allows one to frame it as a virtue--"we corrected ourselves!"--in order to avoid talking about the original vice of being a copy-and-paste propaganda organ for the state.
There seems to be a very tight integration between the government and the major media, and this is a real problem. It's not surprising, as a journalist that is a burr in the saddle of government power soon finds it difficult to talk to government entities. But it is a problem if there really is no journalistic independence. In recent years, journalists seem to be little more than Twitter researchers. Complete randos from the Internet, some of whom were clearly a little bit mad, got closer to the actual truth than the "trusted experts."
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...
Readers aren't parsing sentences this closely and comparing to previous statements.
Unless they come out with an editorial statement apologizing then they aren't really serious about their own involvement in censorship on behalf of those in power.
Damage done.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
If the Lancet Covid Commission is now claiming it is one of the foremost theories, then it is not fringe.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-evidence-...
https://fee.org/articles/we-failed-danish-newspaper-apologiz...
From April 2: "The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”"
Couple that with the admission from Cotton: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated [from the lab]"
Numerous experts in the field backed up the idea that the virus was engineered or came from a lab.
Even Cotton followed up with further clarification of his original tweets.
"I am pleased to hear you now distinguish between possibility virus was engineered bioweapon (which can be dismissed) and possibility virus entered human population through lab accident (which cannot--and should not--be dismissed)" - From Feb 16, 2020 (referenced in Feb 17, 2020 in Washington Post.
This timeline covers it well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...
Is it bad that people update their thinking when new evidence presents itself? No.
But that doesn't mean people who pushed an idea without evidence should be lauded. A broken clock is right twice a day, after all.
Yeah, and same if you discussed it on HN.
It was a very interesting time to practice independent-mindedness, and get vivid demonstrations on how rare it is.
Yes, that's anecdata, so make of it what you will.
It happened here fairly often. Though less frequently here than most other places online during that time.
Seriously. What do you think is going to happen when there's a worldwide pandemic and people with (in some cases) utterly opposing views on what is safe and advisable as public health policy?
I pointed out the existence of differing viewpoints being silenced, was shouted down, and you follow this up with mockery?
2. I followed up the mockery with a serious point that you have not responded to.
There is an alternate universe where they didn’t test everybody that breathed and don’t publish daily death counts. The only way you’d know there was a pandemic was an uptick in “wash your hands” signs in the restroom. Otherwise it would have been “just that thing going around”.
The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock. No shutdowns. No masks. No hysterical blowhards tweeting about the end of the world on twitter. People just got on with life.
Does this make me a selfish asshole? Perhaps. But I personally think the people screaming to mask up and shut it all down are the true selfish ones. The expect everybody to massively disrupt their lives in order to appease their fear and anxiety. Especially when those mitigations had no prior evidence they’d work and not even a whiff of a stated off-ramp or end goal.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm...
> The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.
Uh, "equivalent pandemic". I don't think so.
[ EDIT: Oh, and also: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-woodstock-pande... ]
The use and abuse of raw data has been a hallmark of the last 2.5 years. Whatever number makes Covid sound worse is the number that gets published and spread. Anything suggesting it isn’t as bad as predicted is buried as a conspiracy or “not peer reviewed”.
World population has grown by a factor of 2.3 since 1968. That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 230,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 1/4 of COVID-19's US numbers.
US population has grown by a factor of 1.65 since 1968.That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 165,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 17% of COVID-19's US numbers
Society is “group think”. Try paying rent in bottle caps, and telling your boss to go fuck themselves when they ask for something. Fear of unemployment and homelessness make that unlikely.
City to city, coast to coast, group think and fear keep us from having serious conversations about consumerisms impact on the environment; don’t touch my capitalism click clack
The difference is that’s group think you’ve been conditioned since birth to believe is as immutable as the orbit of the planets.
If we all “group thought” more bicycles and fewer cars were more appropriate that’s what we’d produce. It’s unjustifiable belief to make it sound as if you’re a truly free agent unaffected by group think and fear of alternatives.
My example would be one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS and pointing out that cloth face masks were not effective against an airborne virus, but n95 masks offered some real protection.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...
I, personally, saw people demand that links to that interview be removed as "disinformation".
I see the concerns. He did qualify a few sentences earlier about the effectiveness of cloth masks is that there is some protection but it's small. Fine, but he was imprecise with his language later on.
People want to (and did) latch on to the quotable portion that they are not effective (read: zero difference from no mask), which is demonstrably false.
With an airborne virus you have to be able to filter the air people are breathing and a cloth face mask that isn't even fitted tightly to the face just cannot do that. This is why you need an n95 mask or better fitted tightly enough to your face to create an air seal.
For example, the Measles also has an airborne spread and the OSHA requirements for medical professionals mandate gloves, eye and face protection, and respiratory protection.
https://www.osha.gov/measles/control-prevention
Note that Flu levels hit record lows globally while Covid continued to spread like wildfire.
>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...
If that's the case, be demonstrable then. Given the physical size of the virus vs the size of holes in say, a cotton mask, combined with the infection rates for the strictest masking areas, I would say your statement is demonstrably false.