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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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All the ended up being unimportant as the end point of the pandemic was everyone gets some natural immunity.

The big difference between the entire town locks themselves in a basement and plays twister for 48 hours and everyone always maintains 6’ of difference is the twister playing people all get covid the first week and the 6’ people it takes 3 months for the entire town to be infected.

(Of course there were reasons to delay infection early for hospital capacity and waiting for vaccines but the true end point was everyone gets it)

The question whether COVID rules like this particular one are reasonable ways to implement a particular goal (reduce transmission rate) given particular assumptions (masks work, ...) is orthogonal to the question of whether the goal and the assumptions are sound, and I doubt we'll get much out of relitigating the latter here for the gorillionth time. It is possible for COVID policy to be misguided, masks to be ineffectual, and the restaurant masking policy to be reasonable (as in sensible given its proponents' beliefs) yet susceptible to the sort of anti-arbitrary-cutoff zinger that the poster above posted, simultaneously.