> Covid has given a lot of terrible, petty, mediocre people a great deal of power, and they won’t be willing to give that up, ever, however often they fail.
There may or may not be times when additional public safety measures must be taken: whether it’s for terrorism or illness. We can debate about the merits of taking off shoes at airports or wearing masks until the cows come home.
But one thing that’s clear is that these extraordinary measures, whatever is deemed important enough to exist, ought to be temporary and have an expiration date otherwise it likely will never end.
If it is up to the continuously wrong ruling class, they will never give up their powers.
A counterexample: When it looked like vaccine uptake was good and cases were going down fast, my state removed all restrictions and mask mandates. Then when delta started sweeping though and hospitals started filling up again, the mask mandates came back. So my experience is the opposite of what you are predicting.
> The presence of Covid, which is invisible and potentially everywhere, can only be ascertained via special tests. While you can give yourself an antigen test at home, the results are far less authoritative than antigen tests administered by authorised agents of the bureaucracy, and these in turn are still less significant than PCR tests, administered by medical professions and processed in a lab.
I just want to meet the author, invite him to to smear some spit or a drop of water from a puddle or whatever on a slide, and look through my old optical microscope to observe just a little bit of microbiology. It's invisible, but it's real, as real as sunlight or gravity.
I have no idea how people functioned before modern science; my brain could not cope.
It's amazing how much bad poetry this author waxes, all the while failing to mention the reality that all the measures had a primary, legitimate, easily verifiable purpose in common: to alleviate the over-capacity ICU beds.
Their ignorance goes so far as to say
> This in Spring 2020 it was ironically the most alarmist regions, those that had imposed the strictest lockdowns nominally for the safety of the elderly, which ended up killing more elderly than anybody else, due to over-hospitalisation, criminal mistreatment of many Sars2 patients and poor, paranoid management of elderly cases.
What? People are dying in hospitals because there are not enough beds!
I feel obliged to point out that, despite submitting this link, I think this is factually in the same territory as climate change denial. It is railing against "elite, globalist, leftists" who are, for unstated reasons, undermining society with their hospitals and schools and vaccines and stuff.
I just find it fascinating, and wonder how much is knowingly telling a story that they know some people want to hear, and how much is constructing a complicated justificaton for their pre-existing beliefs because their political philosophy simply had no answer to "How do you deal with a viral pandemic?".
I think the point is that dealing with a pandemic is very hard and at least some of how we are dealing with it is based in magical thinking, based on how we approach all problems.
If anything the main group he points at is bureaucrats, which in the West are not so much a leftist group as a career path in very centrist politics. The fact that he talks about social construction shows he's at least somewhat versed in postmodernism, which is generally associated with left and post-left thinking.
He does mention leftist elites, but I think he's more talking about the media narrative than some kind of conspiracy plot.
Three quarters through the article the reason is implied to be:
"China faked a Hollywood-style viral pandemic to undermine western political philosophy, and leaders of the world allowed themselves to be fooled because it conveniently grants them more power."
To be fair, alot of political philosophy had no real framework to deal with a pandemic.
Liberal globalism advocated for keeping borders open no matter the cost and against any restrictions of social life at the beginning.
The progressive Left miss-identified quarantine for all entering the country as political scare-mongering against foreigners.
The right is still embarrassing itself on a daily basis, regarding the pandemic. Most of the elderly politicians in all sorts of countries, seem to be entirely unable to adapt to new situations, outside of their life-experienced frame of reference. All they have is the fixated-idea to tunnel through "back to normal times".
The International Institutions were revealed to be underfunded, thus easily subverted and mostly interested in turning the first world into a fortress as protective measures instead of helping.
Government policies for all types & forms of government meandered and flailed.
It seems after several generations since the last pandemic, the experience and institutional knowledge had been wiped out to deal with it. I have no solution for this, but it seems that while theoretical knowledge remains, a correct response can not be inoculated with just that.
I honestly doubt that even with the Obama Playbook around and in use, the outcome would have been much different.
The measures would have been taken half-assed and the actions crippled by cost- and corner-cutting.
Those with the most pandemic experience fared pretty well at the start (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore mostly due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea... ) - but even within these societies the nature of the beast was largely ignored by sub-cultures (religious or otherwise).
It seems that some things, we can only learn and remember, by suffering through it. I hope, that this does not also is the case for imperialistic induced world wars.
They both challenge received wisdom. One bears a social penalty for making any arguments similar to either of these. Yep, checks out. Definitely in the same territory of climate change skeptics.
It's unfair to suggest that being concerned about fairly authoritarian measures amounts to being 'against hospitals', and also to assume somehow that people must have a 'philosophy' and that it somehow has 'no answers for pandemic'.
Creeping power and influence of fairly undemocratic globalist institutions and especially major multinational corporations that have far more power than any local government is a legit concern.
All of said - I do not like this article one bit.
It's really bad.
It's so bad that it should be considered for it's bad logic, more than anything the author has to say about face value.
There are lies, misrepresentations, logical fallacies in every paragraph.
He indicates that 'it's odd' that people can have 'good health but still have COVID', which is not odd at all.
He misrepresents the nature of testing: " Consider all those people these past months who have recovered from a respiratory illness, with fever and cough, without ever being tested." - insinuating in the following sentence that somehow untested individuals with 'fever' are counted as COVID, which is definitely not the case.
The author seems incapable of grasping that having a viral load means 'you have COVID' and importantly - can spread it.
"Central to the definition of Covid, is that mass testing programs be the only means of defining the extent of the disease, assessing the success of the technocratic response, and the virtue of the compliant population. Covid is not like other communicable diseases, which are diagnosed mostly in private, according to likely symptoms. "
Is completely false.
COVID is tested much like every other such disease, using tests made available for private and public, your doctor will apply them just the same and it's ludicrous to suggest a doctorw would only diagnose 'based on symptoms' if there were simple and accessible tests at the ready.
". There is no general unified Covid with a limited set of properties. Attempts to fix its characteristics dissolve in a pool of contradictory evidence. "
Yes, this is called Science. It's a new disease and our understanding of it changes rapidly.
"Reinfection aligns neatly with established doctrine about the inadequacy of our natural defences. "
No, it's just a common thing that happens in viral diseases.
" Remember that this all started with "two weeks to crush the curve,"
Yes, we had very short period of time to change behaviours to bring the R0 down. It mostly worked.
"To begin with, vaccines, while indeed extra-natural, merely stimulate natural immunity. If we may hope for a vaccine, it is unclear why we cannot let some of our natural immune systems join the fight. "
This is a totally nonsensical and contradictory statement. We know some people are infected, and we adjust that into our policy. We also know it's of much less risk to children and that they do actually represent some threshold of natural immunity.
He uses the term 'extra-natural' in different situations without any context, it has no meaning.
It's really difficult to parse through this really terrible reasoning, I'm all for contrarian arguments but this is a terrible piece.
"In the West, Covid has acquired a variety of features that demand constant and heavy-handed technocratic intervention. This is not the case everywhere, but in the West, where technocratic bureaucracies dominate,"
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, S. Korea? Arguably even Japan pragmatically.
Basically all non-Western states with modern economies have take roughly similar actions, some of them much more stringent.
It is what happens when an entire society keeps to themselves for ~17 years and makes it acceptable to binge watch television and eat junk food.
The Brood X Cicada comes out of the ground ~1y after human "induced" disaster:
1987 After competitive rush of capitalism fills the mind of Diatlov with aggression causing Chernobyl
2003 after 3 NYC commerce office buildings fell Perfectly into their foundations, Iraq war begins, and first social media surveillance tools deployed
2021 after natural/deployed respiratory illness for stagnant daily routines for bodies that quit moving. "Zombie" media entertainment uses these citizens as reference.
"Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt." -Juvenal
We used to be pioneers but the machines made us docile.
I will go to my grave thinking that we'd have never locked down for COVID back in the 80s, 90s and even 00s.
Matter of fact we didn't lockdown in the early 00s for SARS.
Further it seems to me that the progress in prolonging human lifespan and the collapsing levels of interpersonal violence are not worth it if the price to pay is constantly living in fear.
Whether we like it or not we must admit that the self -confidence and arrogance that causes a bar brawl comes from the same part of the brain that compels people to publish their long odds theory of everything or a moon shot company.
Which is incidentally the same part of the brain which gives people the arrogance to think that COVID is a nothingburger and they'd never catch it , and if they ever catch it they'd never die from it.
People thought that the castration of Western society would have been a free lunch. There is no free lunch out there.
> Undeniably, Sars2—like many other viruses—exploits the social activity of humans. Until now, the Covid bureaucrats have responded with rolling seasonal embargoes on all human social activity that is not mediated by electronics. People who violate these restrictions are behaving irresponsibly and endangering all of society. Consider how much this stance differs from their approach to other viruses. Were gay men, at any point, ever exhorted to abstain from anal sex in the interests of defeating HIV? Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics? Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve? No, they weren’t; and if any of that had happened, we’d be reading to this day what a grave injustice all of it was. HIV is undeniably much harder on those it infects than Sars2, and I submit that, in the hierarchy of human needs, quotidian social interaction ranks well above anal sex.
This post was so well-written! Despite the fact that it’s somewhat against the mainstream narrative and thus will never gain wide recognition.
This comparison between HIV/AIDS and SarsCov2/Covid is probably the most damning indictment of society’s mismanagement of this virus.
> Were gay men, at any point, ever exhorted to abstain from anal sex in the interests of defeating HIV?
Yes. The fact that gay sex was already illegal in many places just made it less controversial.
> Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics?
Yes. What was different then was that people dying due to "the gay flu" was not seen as a bad thing. And note that those who had HIV were not a threat to the public around them (barring those who came into contact with their bodily fluids), unlike for Covid.
> Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve?
With particular regard to contact tracing, nowadays failure to tell your partner if you know you are HIV positive is a crime, and healthcare providers are required to report the sex partners of positive individuals.
> This comparison between HIV/AIDS and SarsCov2/Covid is probably the most damning indictment of society’s mismanagement of this virus.
Well, I mean, except that:
(1) It seems to assume a lot of false similarities between HIV and SARS-COV-2, and
(2) It explicitly takes false positions on every question it asks and then answers about the response to HIV (literally everything it says was not done was, in fact, done), and
(3) It fails to recognize that the HIV pandemic itself was badly mismanaged, so that even if it wasn't wrong on analogizing the pandemics and wasn't wrong on all the facts of the HIV response, it would still have no probative value on the point it tries to make.
[+] [-] logicalmonster|4 years ago|reply
There may or may not be times when additional public safety measures must be taken: whether it’s for terrorism or illness. We can debate about the merits of taking off shoes at airports or wearing masks until the cows come home.
But one thing that’s clear is that these extraordinary measures, whatever is deemed important enough to exist, ought to be temporary and have an expiration date otherwise it likely will never end.
If it is up to the continuously wrong ruling class, they will never give up their powers.
[+] [-] amanaplanacanal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aoisdfjoaisdjf|4 years ago|reply
This is poetry
[+] [-] LeifCarrotson|4 years ago|reply
I have no idea how people functioned before modern science; my brain could not cope.
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes are also 'invisible and everywhere' - and we test for them in the same way as he describes: doctors, labs etc..
Thankfully COVID tests are much cheaper, and you can absolutely obtain some for yourself if you want.
I'm all for rational skepticism but this piece is bizarre.
[+] [-] sorokod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhanschoo|4 years ago|reply
Their ignorance goes so far as to say
> This in Spring 2020 it was ironically the most alarmist regions, those that had imposed the strictest lockdowns nominally for the safety of the elderly, which ended up killing more elderly than anybody else, due to over-hospitalisation, criminal mistreatment of many Sars2 patients and poor, paranoid management of elderly cases.
What? People are dying in hospitals because there are not enough beds!
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
I just find it fascinating, and wonder how much is knowingly telling a story that they know some people want to hear, and how much is constructing a complicated justificaton for their pre-existing beliefs because their political philosophy simply had no answer to "How do you deal with a viral pandemic?".
[+] [-] beaconstudios|4 years ago|reply
If anything the main group he points at is bureaucrats, which in the West are not so much a leftist group as a career path in very centrist politics. The fact that he talks about social construction shows he's at least somewhat versed in postmodernism, which is generally associated with left and post-left thinking.
He does mention leftist elites, but I think he's more talking about the media narrative than some kind of conspiracy plot.
[+] [-] shadofx|4 years ago|reply
"China faked a Hollywood-style viral pandemic to undermine western political philosophy, and leaders of the world allowed themselves to be fooled because it conveniently grants them more power."
[+] [-] PicassoCTs|4 years ago|reply
Liberal globalism advocated for keeping borders open no matter the cost and against any restrictions of social life at the beginning. The progressive Left miss-identified quarantine for all entering the country as political scare-mongering against foreigners. The right is still embarrassing itself on a daily basis, regarding the pandemic. Most of the elderly politicians in all sorts of countries, seem to be entirely unable to adapt to new situations, outside of their life-experienced frame of reference. All they have is the fixated-idea to tunnel through "back to normal times".
The International Institutions were revealed to be underfunded, thus easily subverted and mostly interested in turning the first world into a fortress as protective measures instead of helping.
Government policies for all types & forms of government meandered and flailed. It seems after several generations since the last pandemic, the experience and institutional knowledge had been wiped out to deal with it. I have no solution for this, but it seems that while theoretical knowledge remains, a correct response can not be inoculated with just that.
I honestly doubt that even with the Obama Playbook around and in use, the outcome would have been much different. The measures would have been taken half-assed and the actions crippled by cost- and corner-cutting.
Those with the most pandemic experience fared pretty well at the start (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore mostly due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea... ) - but even within these societies the nature of the beast was largely ignored by sub-cultures (religious or otherwise).
It seems that some things, we can only learn and remember, by suffering through it. I hope, that this does not also is the case for imperialistic induced world wars.
[+] [-] splitstud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
Creeping power and influence of fairly undemocratic globalist institutions and especially major multinational corporations that have far more power than any local government is a legit concern.
All of said - I do not like this article one bit.
It's really bad.
It's so bad that it should be considered for it's bad logic, more than anything the author has to say about face value.
There are lies, misrepresentations, logical fallacies in every paragraph.
He indicates that 'it's odd' that people can have 'good health but still have COVID', which is not odd at all.
He misrepresents the nature of testing: " Consider all those people these past months who have recovered from a respiratory illness, with fever and cough, without ever being tested." - insinuating in the following sentence that somehow untested individuals with 'fever' are counted as COVID, which is definitely not the case.
The author seems incapable of grasping that having a viral load means 'you have COVID' and importantly - can spread it.
"Central to the definition of Covid, is that mass testing programs be the only means of defining the extent of the disease, assessing the success of the technocratic response, and the virtue of the compliant population. Covid is not like other communicable diseases, which are diagnosed mostly in private, according to likely symptoms. "
Is completely false.
COVID is tested much like every other such disease, using tests made available for private and public, your doctor will apply them just the same and it's ludicrous to suggest a doctorw would only diagnose 'based on symptoms' if there were simple and accessible tests at the ready.
". There is no general unified Covid with a limited set of properties. Attempts to fix its characteristics dissolve in a pool of contradictory evidence. "
Yes, this is called Science. It's a new disease and our understanding of it changes rapidly.
"Reinfection aligns neatly with established doctrine about the inadequacy of our natural defences. "
No, it's just a common thing that happens in viral diseases.
" Remember that this all started with "two weeks to crush the curve,"
Yes, we had very short period of time to change behaviours to bring the R0 down. It mostly worked.
"To begin with, vaccines, while indeed extra-natural, merely stimulate natural immunity. If we may hope for a vaccine, it is unclear why we cannot let some of our natural immune systems join the fight. "
This is a totally nonsensical and contradictory statement. We know some people are infected, and we adjust that into our policy. We also know it's of much less risk to children and that they do actually represent some threshold of natural immunity.
He uses the term 'extra-natural' in different situations without any context, it has no meaning.
It's really difficult to parse through this really terrible reasoning, I'm all for contrarian arguments but this is a terrible piece.
[+] [-] fouc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, S. Korea? Arguably even Japan pragmatically.
Basically all non-Western states with modern economies have take roughly similar actions, some of them much more stringent.
[+] [-] beaconstudios|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mackwell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xlaacid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smelter|4 years ago|reply
The Brood X Cicada comes out of the ground ~1y after human "induced" disaster:
1987 After competitive rush of capitalism fills the mind of Diatlov with aggression causing Chernobyl
2003 after 3 NYC commerce office buildings fell Perfectly into their foundations, Iraq war begins, and first social media surveillance tools deployed
2021 after natural/deployed respiratory illness for stagnant daily routines for bodies that quit moving. "Zombie" media entertainment uses these citizens as reference.
"Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt." -Juvenal
We used to be pioneers but the machines made us docile.
[+] [-] GDC7|4 years ago|reply
Matter of fact we didn't lockdown in the early 00s for SARS.
Further it seems to me that the progress in prolonging human lifespan and the collapsing levels of interpersonal violence are not worth it if the price to pay is constantly living in fear.
Whether we like it or not we must admit that the self -confidence and arrogance that causes a bar brawl comes from the same part of the brain that compels people to publish their long odds theory of everything or a moon shot company.
Which is incidentally the same part of the brain which gives people the arrogance to think that COVID is a nothingburger and they'd never catch it , and if they ever catch it they'd never die from it.
People thought that the castration of Western society would have been a free lunch. There is no free lunch out there.
[+] [-] lnxg33k1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitz_skull|4 years ago|reply
This post was so well-written! Despite the fact that it’s somewhat against the mainstream narrative and thus will never gain wide recognition.
This comparison between HIV/AIDS and SarsCov2/Covid is probably the most damning indictment of society’s mismanagement of this virus.
[+] [-] jjk166|4 years ago|reply
Yes. The fact that gay sex was already illegal in many places just made it less controversial.
> Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics?
Yes. What was different then was that people dying due to "the gay flu" was not seen as a bad thing. And note that those who had HIV were not a threat to the public around them (barring those who came into contact with their bodily fluids), unlike for Covid.
> Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve?
Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/08/nyregion/city-closes-bar-...
With particular regard to contact tracing, nowadays failure to tell your partner if you know you are HIV positive is a crime, and healthcare providers are required to report the sex partners of positive individuals.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
Well, I mean, except that:
(1) It seems to assume a lot of false similarities between HIV and SARS-COV-2, and
(2) It explicitly takes false positions on every question it asks and then answers about the response to HIV (literally everything it says was not done was, in fact, done), and
(3) It fails to recognize that the HIV pandemic itself was badly mismanaged, so that even if it wasn't wrong on analogizing the pandemics and wasn't wrong on all the facts of the HIV response, it would still have no probative value on the point it tries to make.