Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
2mo ago
I considered making this an edit but I think it would better serve as a separate comment.
I disagree that vaccine mandate demands were the result of grassroot popular demand foisted upon politicians. I think the evidence for this is stronger than it is for lockdowns, because the explanation for why someone might wants them depends quite specifically on official statements about the properties of covid, vaccines, and those who refuse to take them. Official statements that frequently turned out to be wrong. All to set up the axioms required for popular support for vaccine mandates: That those who refuse to take the vaccines are not merely wrong, not merely evil, but instead are actively dangerous to you, because unlike the righteous vaccinated, they can still have and spread covid to you and murder you. This is not an organic belief. It cannot be an organic belief because the entire pro-restriction tale of lockdowns is that your organic beliefs about vaccines are all wrong and the only legitimate source of information about vaccines is from the government, which specifically lied about vaccines stopping transmission.
In the absence of government efforts to make people believe the axioms that lead to vaccine mandates, that randomly half-way through 2021 people would have a fever dream and subsequently believe the government should own their neighbours veins is even less coherent than the equivalent for lockdowns.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
The UK government did continue being gung-ho for lockdowns "next winter", as in the winter of 21/22. Their failure to implement renewed restrictions that would have lead to lockdowns is likely a confluence of multiple factors limiting their ability to encourage support for them. Some of these factors include:
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Less MPs were pro-lockdown now, with more of them slowly being convinced that it was bad policy. Not enough to defeat the government but enough to mean there was organised political opposition to match the disorganised discontent from the public.
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A single journalist asked a question to a covid modeller on Twitter that finally caused the fraudulent modelling justification for restrictions to fall apart, after one of the modellers effectively confessed they were making up worst case scenarios for policy-based evidence-making.
I do not know what motivated the government to do lockdowns in the first place. Nor do I claim to know. And therefore I don't know what motivated them to stop pushing for them as their sole political objective. But I am quite certain that "the public wanted them" cannot explain it, mainly because it cannot explain why the public wanted them without first requiring the government also wanting them.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
The governments were doing all this while using standard propaganda channels to force public opinion to be in it's favour. That these efforts would grow weaker over time as the disconnect between the government line about the properties of covid and the real-world properties of covid was increasingly noticed by a public that knew more and more people who got covid and then didn't die is unsurprising.
They lost seats to a party that wanted even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly.
And if Labour was in charge to do the even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly, Labour would have been kicked out by voters after the economy was even worse. Voters might not understand that lockdowns are the reason the economy is fucked, but they'll punish the incumbents for it all the same.
The Tories u-turned after all neighboring countries had implemented harsh lockdowns and after the press
All neighboring countries had not implemented harsh lockdowns.
Cummings (supposedly intelligent, although I think he’s clearly shown himself otherwise) then panicked and told Boris that he had better implement lockdowns or risk some kind of popular revolt if the UK’s death rate was much higher than other countries.
Cummings was pro-lockdown very early. This seemed to be more out of some infatuation with perceived Asian efficiency/superiority leading to a desire to randomly copy China, rather than any coherent explanation of why lockdowns might work. Only after he broke lockdown restrictions was this memory-holed and the story changed to one where he wasn't supporting them from early on.
As for the idea of a popular revolt over the government not imprisoning you hard enough, how is it coherent to revolt with demand to be imprisoned? If you organically fear covid, why would you pour out into the streets to overthrow a government to replace it with one that will imprison you? Slavish obedience to government and revolt do not go hand in hand.
The UK worships arr en haech ess, and arr enn haech ess was (according to the press and itself) about to be overwhelmed with corpses and dying grandmothers who had survived the Blitz only to die because Boris didn’t lock down the country.
Which fails to explain why the press would claim that the NHS was about to be overwhelmed and that lockdowns would cause it to not be overwhelmed, leaving the origin of the policy unexplained.
But that can't have been the group the mandates were originally intended to target, because that group only exists post the mandates! Its not even a meaningful thing without them.
Opponents of lockdowns predate the introduction of vaccine mandates.
But that can't have been WHY they imposed lockdowns or the like because that group was created by their lockdown actions in the first place.
The vaccine mandates target this group, not the lockdowns.
The Tories didn't lose the recent election because of Covid response, they lost it due to a soggy economy and having been in power for 14 years.
The disastrous state of the economy is due to the Covid response, so yes, that's why they lost the election as badly as they did.
Whether you want to believe it or not, the vast majority of MPs only pressured Boris to change course, because they individually were under pressure from their constituents. They aren't cartoon villains who were secretly wanting to take over.
Which only shifts the question to why constituents wanted lockdowns in the supposedly government-not-wanting-lockdown UK, while those in Sweden didn't want lockdowns. If the answer is the media, then why did the media not push Sweden into lockdowns? At some point, there needs to be some explanation for why the UK did this policy while some of our peers did not, and the most credible explanation is that the government wanted to do it. Maybe not all MPs, maybe not all in government, but a large enough proportion were able to use their powers to ramp up fear and then offer to resolve that fear with lockdowns.
The alternative explanation is that everyone just woke up one day in mid-March after dreaming up an entirely new suite of policies that they wanted, for no reason, and therefore the government had to do these policies, because there's no proposed mechanism here for why the public would organically desire this policy after never even suggesting it for Hong Kong Flu, Asian Flu, HIV, Swine Flu, and countless other smaller epidemics.
And if they don't want to be seen as cartoon villains, all they had to do was not do lockdowns.
The government wasn't the one driving the fear initially.
But the timeline of government action is just not consistent with the government being commited to making those decisions in advance to target some specific group.
Again, you're confusing me saying vaccine mandates were targeted at dissidents with me saying lockdowns were targeted at dissidents. They're two different policies, and I never claimed the latter.
In addition, you can take this or not, but I used to work in government and for both Labour and Tory parties, and I know quite a few MPs personally, including some very high up in the decision making tree. They were indeed pressured into making those decisions by the public. They were terrified of the amount of vitriol they were getting for not acting.
Committing monstrous crimes against humanity because you're scared that a public that despises you anyway will despise you is not a coherent explanation for their behaviour. If they are scared of being voted out, see my prior comments on how the government clearly isn't maximizing for popularity. Their position on immigration is enough to explain that. If they are scared of something more dramatic like being murdered, then their concern should be the growing number of Islamists in the country due to their immigration policy, not that Doreen, 72, retired civil servant is suddenly going to turn into a killer because she's scared of the spicy flu. And in terms of how they acted, the only group that ever seemed to scare them was anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters, judging by how violently they reacted towards them compared to e.g. BLM protesters.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".
No, but if your response to something as bad as X is nothing, then your response to something as bad as 2.5X should be somewhere between nothing and slightly more than nothing, not to go metaphorically nuclear.
Except that doesn't account for the Boomers as above. Who are more likely to be conservative themselves. The motive that best explains the turn is simple fear.
Boomers are more likely to be conservative in the UK sense, but this is not conservative in the American sense. Similarly, the Tory government of the time was also not meaningfully conservative in the American sense. But also, the difference between young people and boomers is pretty small: Most young people supported lockdown, just less so than boomers.
Simple fear is not a credible explanation of what happened because it simply shifts the discussion to why there was fear for this and not other similarly (and over their whole lives, more) dangerous illnesses for the old, such as cancer, heart disease, or dementia. Why would people demand such extreme interventions as imprisoning all of society to protect themselves from a spicy cold, while ignoring the 20 QALY bills littering the ground called "stop smoking", "stop being fat", "stop drinking" and such? And for reference, a lifetime of heavy smoking is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than getting COVID. It's more QALY loss than dying from COVID, even.
As I'll keep repeating every time this was brought up, the Tory British government did not want to mandate lockdowns and the like, the original response was not to do that. But so many MP's got inundated with letters and emails and phone calls from fearful constituents that they made a very public U-turn. Particularly from older voter's who are more likely to be on the right.
Which again, just shifts the question to why did they do this? There are several glaring gaps in this narrative of why lockdowns happened. Why did "boomers" suddenly fear covid so much while not fearing other common boomer ailments? Why did "boomers" suddenly believe this was something that the government should do something about? Why did "boomers" suddenly believe that lockdowns were an option and would work, when this was never done or even meaningfully suggested prior to 2020? And most importantly, why did countries that didn't buy into lockdowns not have their government's similarly browbeaten into doing lockdowns by public demand? Swedes did not have a lockdown, and Swedes mostly agreed with that policy. Swedes opinion of their government's response to COVID is better than most countries, which is the opposite of what you should expect to happen if lockdowns were the result of some inevitable grassroots demand.
The UK's unwritten constitution functions as an elective dictatorship by parliament. In 2020, this shifted somewhat to be an elective dictatorship by the executive of government. But in either case there was no reason why MPs couldn't ignore constituents and refuse to do lockdowns. You could argue that this would make them unpopular and lose their seats, but look at the 2024 election results. They did lockdowns and lost their seats harder than any government in living memory has ever lost their seats, half because of the predictable consequences of lockdowns destroying the economy, public services and the social fabric, and half because they ramped up immigration even higher. At no point have the Tories indicated any aptitude for popularity-maxing, not that lockdowns even are popularity-maxing in the long run.
The conclusion that best matches the data is that every step was driven by government decision because the government wanted to do lockdowns. There was fear because the government wanted fear, and made it so. There was demand for government intervention because the government communicated that they could control the virus. And there was demand for lockdowns because the government communicated that it was possible, would work, and eventually, that anyone who didn't want them was evil in some way. And in Sweden, none of this process happened because the government there didn't want lockdowns, and therefore didn't do any of the groundwork necessary to impose them on a pliant public. I do not believe the government accidentally stumbled into lockdowns for the same reason I don't believe it's possible to accidentally build a shelf - you can't accidentally do something that requires deliberate planning and coordination to carry out. Especially, you can't accidentally stumble into committing crimes against humanity.
There is further evidence that the people responsible for lockdowns wanted lockdowns, mostly contained in leaked conversations, but I think it is unnecessary to present such conversations to make the rather simple claim that governments do things because they want to do them, and don't do things they don't want to do.
And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take
"Forced" to? How? Pressured by the public is one thing, but forced? I'm willing to hear out some explanation of how the government was forced, but if it doesn't involve shadowy figures putting a literal gun to the head of MPs, I'm not sure how they can be "forced" to do something they don't want to do.
What group of people who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated do you think the Conservative government driven by Conservative voters were trying to purge?
Opponents of lockdowns and the pandemic response in general. Because as a group, we were the only meaningful opposition and threat to the government at the time. It's a matter of public record that the government spied on lockdown critics. when it wasn't more openly sending the police to beat us up. Any other prospective "threat" can be easily dealt with by declaring another variant and locking them down again.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
I have not seen any study that specifically breaks out a category with BMI >50, probably because this is quite a small population. Obesity is common, but is classified as >30. A BMI of 50 is tripling the difference between normal weight and obesity.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
But have there been any previous epidemics where there existed a loud and visible group of dedicated "anti-vaxxers" whom the boomers didn't deride as hopeless imbeciles?
HIV, and the loud and visible group of "people who are sexually active". Abstinence and it's advocates was treated as hopelessly imbecilic.
And the Swine Flu pandemic, probably because the vaccine distribution was limited, existed to treat something that was probably less bad than regularly circulating flu, and gave some people narcolepsy.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
The effect of both smoking and obesity on COVID mortality are inconclusive and therefore, at worst, small compared to the effect of age. This is true for pretty much every "comorbidity". It's just hard to do anything to make it more likely you will die of covid that won't get drowned out by being a few years old.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
If the age distribution of Hong Kong flu behaved like COVID, then this alone would drop mortality rate by ~60%. Algeria is about 10 years younger than the US, for example. Combined, the effect would be that COVID is about 2.5 times as deadly as Hong Kong flu. The response from authorities was at least several orders of magnitude more severe.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
It is not possible to understand what happened in 2020-2022 as a proportionate response to disease because it wasn't. COVID is not a disease that primarily affects children or leaves them with disabilities. COVID is not a disease where the number infected can be changed in the long-term by any existing intervention. The motive that best explains the turn to extreme pro-mandate activism (such as supporting assaulting people with needles, or throwing them in concentration camps) is it's status as a shibboleth - that vaccine mandates can be used as an excuse to carry out political purges of people you don't like, who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
They are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Alright, now it's fixed.
That's what I get for writing this up on my phone at stupid o'clock.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Then there's something wrong with the software of the site, because it's fixed for me.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Apart from the minutia of the search and rescue efforts for the capsized ship, there's not much additional detail in any English Language reporting I could find. Apart from that, there's a lot of conspiratorial speculation about the timings of both deaths, but again without adding any more information. The added stuff about the legal background below helps.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Yes. Fixed.
Mike Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain were co-defendents in a high-profile fraud case in the US. They were acquitted in June. Chamberlain has died, and Lynch is missing presumed dead, after two separate incidents on the same weekend. So understandably, this has raised some suspicion.
Brief background on the fraud case. Mike Lynch founded Autonomy. Later sold it to HP for $11bn in 2011. Was accused of fraud to inflate the value of the company before it's sale. In a civil trial in the UK, damages were set to be awarded to HP. But he also faced extradition to the US for criminal fraud charges. Eventually in May 2023, after much wrangling about whether he could be extradited, he was sent to the US to face trial alongside Chamberlain. Trial began in March. Acquitted on all charges in June.
Stephen Chamberlain died after being hit by a car while out for a walk in Cambridgeshire on the morning of the 17th. Then, Lynch's ship capsized in Sicily on the morning of the 19th. One dead, six missing including Lynch.
If you don't vote, and you have a free and open ballot, you're saying you're fine with any option that wins.
The UK does not have a free and open ballot if what you want to vote for runs into restrictions on speech. It makes it very difficult for candidates to legally advertise their political position, or for you to campaign for it. In the past, it was possible to get elected from prison, but the Representation of the People Act 1981 put a stop to that. Liberal Democracy depends on a tightly interlocking system of rights to enable free elections. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you have. Removing one element can break a whole lot more.
Spoiling your secret ballot is an option. That's what I did back when de facto suppression of anti-lockdown dissidents meant I had no anti-lockdown candidates to vote for. But those weren't free and open elections, since public assembly by those expressing my favoured political views was criminalized.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Critically, there is a recognition that free expression carries with it a duty of responsibility. The UK law requires that such free speech is not used to incite criminality or spread hatred.
UK law doesn't require that speech isn't used to spread hatred. I am, for now, permitted to spread my hatred of onions as far and wide as I want. Their texture is disgusting and they make everything you put them in taste the same. But also, the UK does not have free speech regardless. The law is asymmetrical. Those to the right of the mainstream are prohibited from voicing their hatreds, while those to the left of the mainstream are allowed to rant about "zionists" and the like all they want.
Which is the inherent problem with the idea of criminalizing spreading hatred. Which hatreds? Hatred of Russia, for daring to invade Ukraine? Hatred of the unvaccinated and so-called granny killers? Hatred of the Far-Right? These are all forms of hatred that have been deliberately spread by the government over the last few years. Why are these forms of hatred not just allowed but endorsed? That's a rhetorical question, because the answer is too obvious.
The result is that restrictions on spreading hatred are always used to promote certain political views while suppressing others. That's not a slight tweak to make freedom of speech all nice and cuddly. Restrictions on hate speech instead directly attack free speech's common purposes: Democratic participation, truth-seeking, and checking power.
The error is motivated reasoning due to being unwilling to criticize heavy-handed covid-excused policy. The downside is that this is hard to cash in on because it's not a bet on just inflation, but also on how deranged the government is - predicting higher inflation also means predicting a more insane government, which reduces the value of any rewards of predicting correctly.
For the sake of example to illustrate that government insanity matters for economic bets, consider 2 people betting on whether the government will rob them and take half their money. The actual chance of this happening is 50%. But if the bet is even, the payoff matrix looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HQ1PibN.png. Therefore it's actually beneficial to bet that the government will do nothing.
Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theory and therefore is a bit too much of a reach to be a point of evidence here.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.
Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the money supply M2 grew 40%. The economy grew 19%. There was no reason to believe there was some long-term change in the velocity of money. Just from these numbers alone you can expect about 18% inflation. And, sure enough, the price level increased by about 20%.
You can repeat this for other countries. The UK money supply M2 grew 24%. The economy did not grow at all. Expectation: 24% increase in price level. Reality: 24% increase in price level.
Denying that increasing the money supply as was done in 2020 would cause inflation, or that it would be "transitory", comes from the same motivated reasoning that applied to the entire era of covid policy. Criticizing a heavy-handed response made you persona non grata in professional circles, so you didn't. As for placing bets on it to make money, the risk is not the existing consequences of government policy, but that you're betting on how deranged your local government is. Inflation is not the only consideration in such a circumstance, so it's no surprise that even people putting their money where there mouth is were bad sources of predictions.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
You are right, but you asked for the Steelman argument. That isn't the political turing test argument for it, which is that two-tier policing in any form doesn't exist.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
The steelman to there being no two-tier policing is that the difference in police response to different demographics is motivated not by racism, but instead by a desire to prevent escalation to violence. The police know that if they break up a BLM riot, the next day half of London will be aflame, so they don't touch it. But milquetoast anti-lockdown protesters, who are maybe protesting for the first time in their life? There's no risk to baton charging them, so they get baton charged. Repeat for Hamas vs Israeli marches. If they start arresting tens of thousands of Islamists for terrorism offences, as the letter of the law would demand, they'd face retaliatory terror attacks. Peaceful Jewish counter-protesters might similarly provoke the violent Islamists, however, and need to be stopped.
This steelman is the mainstream response to arguments of two-tier policing (when not simply ignored). The police are biased because they're pragmatic, rather than because they are racist or serving as the paramilitary wing of the Labour party.
It has two problems
- It means that those who dislike being on the receiving end of two-tier policing are instructed to be more violent if they want it to stop
- As is being demonstrated now, being more violent doesn't actually get it to stop, because the argument is wrong.
How likely is it that Trump will do something about the Houthis.
How likely is it that the Houthi shipping attacks will stop because they expect Trump retaliation without Trump having to do anything?
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