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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   28130 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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My parents grew up south Europe, born during WW2, and I couldn't believe the level of poverty they endured. I visited the 7,500 person town they grew up in and even today in 2024 it still doesn't have consistent running water and each house has maybe 20 amp electrical service max. You could eat a chicken once a month on special occasions. Dinner involved some starch and beans, every night, usually the same thing. Family members having spent time either in prison for being reported by neighbors with a gripe, or serving as conscripts, or both.

Violence too? Each parent had a sibling killed under circumstances they never quite explain to me. Another sibling (my uncle) becomes mentally retarded from some disease they couldn't even put a name on, because access to health care didn't exist. "He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world.

How fucking frightening a world was the relatively recent past. And yet my parents hardly complain about anything. I cannot fucking deal with listening to them stoically describe their upbringing and early life in the US (as illegal immigrants, another fun adventure) and then contrast with the median gen-Zer complaining about their absolute life of amazing luxury today.

I'm sure the horror damaged my parents in ways that aren't legible and that they would not have chosen it if they could do life again, but I'm also not sure this life of absolutely pure luxury we have today (by contrast) actually is the stuff that a good world springs from. Maybe the problem is bad morals, but I struggle to articulate it. It sure would be a shame if you needed the hard times to create the strong men.

I'd class the suffering of the affluent as a different type of suffering. Because when you're starving, facing the possibility of homelessness, facing disease etc., there is a sense of realness and gravitas and urgency to what has befallen you, it is a genuine pain, whereas the suffering of the affluent is a reverse of this; it's not very painful or urgent but it's also completely meaningless, so it manifests as frustration. Put another way, a society that has largely eliminated the extreme negatives of life has flattened the spectrum of human experience, so that for an affluent person to feel any sense of meaning or depth to his life, he must obtain some extremely positive experience. Otherwise life will feel flat and empty. The vast majority of us though lack the means to get some extremely positive experience, so we're stuck living mundane, flat lives. Our pain is not exactly pain -- it's a vague, dull pang of awareness that life can be much more.

Unironically, this reminds me of the "power principle" articulated in the Unabomber's Manifesto. We used to simply focus on survival, and by achieving survival, which took a large amount of effort, we were fairly satisfied. But now survival is almost effortless, and we have so much left over wanting.

In the place of survival, we invent things to pursue to try to find that same satisfaction. But they have to be things that are some kind of balance between hard and achievable. If they're too easy, we find the achievement hollow. If too hard, we despair. Just right, like getting a PhD in marine biology from a prestigious school. There we go.

Except some people never find that moderately difficult but achievable task. Or they achieve one and never figure out another one to replace it. Those people feel really lost. Life loses meaning. Integrate over society and you get, well, gestures at everything

For most of recorded history hard times created stunted dumb peasants that were 5 feet tall and had an IQ of 95 max. You want good times with a challenge, you don't want HARD TIMES™.

You don't need a high IQ to be a peasant though.

I recently enjoyed this article about goiter in Switzerland posted on the SSC board https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil

What a great article! Thanks for the read. Amazing that reactionaries always show up to shit on the new and working interventions! Those poor kids kept dumb and disabled till the 50's because of that one doctor! Reminds me of the hand washing guy that said maybe you should wash your hands in between delivering babies and was drummed out of medicine. I think the HARD TIMES™ folks on here have no idea what they are advocating for, and the horror of it.

Worse yet, it was washing your hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies.

Finally, he made a startling realization. A fellow doctor died of what appeared to be a case of childbed fever after cutting himself with a scalpel that had been used during an autopsy of one of the women.

The physicians, Semmelweis realized, had been dissecting infected cadavers with their bare hands. Then, with those same contaminated hands, they were delivering babies.

“They were inoculating their patients with bacteria,” Perlow said. “They were basically immersed in pus for hours.”

Yep. An American, a North Korean and a South Korean.

Enormous enough adversity degrades and permanently weakens people. A child of starvation and parasite infestations doesn't make for large tough adults.

I seem to recall reading that US and South Korean border guards are selected to be particularly tall specifically for, er, diplomatic reasons. But I don't have a citation on-hand.

It's obviously propaganda. I don't know how you look at the guy on the left or right and think "yep, that's what an average typical American/South Korean looks like."

Surely the North Koreans are doing the same.

It was an interesting twist of WWI that for many citizens of the UK getting drafted into the army was a substantial increase in their quality of life. If you were a common prole you were likely medically or physically unfit for the high danger roles, and now you were getting 3 square meals a day and proper medical care for the first time in your life.

Isn't this kind of true of military service in the US? Isn't the army actually not a bad deal if you live in a poor enough area?

The army is a fantastic way to access upwards mobility that wouldn't be otherwise available, yes, but by US standards you'd have to come from a really poor neighborhood to get a quality of life improvement from it in the short term.

If you're poor in the US the military is a fantastic option for upward mobility. But the US also hasn't fought a war like WWI for 80 years, so the potential downside is significantly lower than the prospect of someone signing up for the Great War.

Cf. the hygiene hypothesis. I think there’s a good case to be made that having early exposure to a representative range of evolutionarily relevant stimuli helps individuals to calibrate in multiple domains. If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.

I suspect one reason this might not show up in the data (or be argued for by academics) as much as it should is the confound from heredity. Yes, if you look at modern American kids who are exposed to trauma, you’ll probably find less well-adjusted adults, but that’s because a huge amount of the potential trauma in your critical windows of development comes from your parents and immediate family, and if they’re fucked up, it raises the chances you will be too. I think this helps explain why eg WW2 concentration camp survivors often go on to live happy lives, in seeming contradiction to the modern narrative that even isolated traumatic experiences fuck you up. Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.

Of course, there’s also the chronic/acute distinction. If you’re abused by a primary caregiver throughout childhood, that will also lead to long-term miscalibration of your hedonistat, because most humans have historically been reasonably good at looking after their kids.

More on the PTSD subject here, for example. He observes that 1) combat experience was ubiquitous, and 2) it was viewed positively by the broader society. So returning veterans were told they did a great thing, that whatever they were experiencing was normal and also manly, and then were prescribed the socially accepted purification rituals to code-switch back into farming. Compare Scott’s discussion on neurasthenia: humans can probably adapt to the social context for all sorts of mental states.

I think I’ve also seen variants of @Ioper’s point, where increased range and especially industrial artillery made the difference. It seems likely that a constant drip of adrenaline would have dramatic effects on the psyche; the trenches plausibly maintained that stress much more than pre-modern warfare. But we still see PTSD from maneuver warfare, COIN, and other situations that should be as different from WWI as WWI was from the American Revolution. I’m not sure that physical response can explain the whole picture.

I think one more important aspect is the impersonal nature of modern warfare, which ties into the aspect of helplessness.

When you fight someone with a spear, a bow, a musket or a bayonet, you see your opponents die from your violent actions. You have a simple "problem -> action -> no problem" chain.

When the vast majority of your opponents are killed by artillery, aircraft and drones and the vast majority of your own casualties come from either artillery, aircraft and drones or traps, suicide bombers and IEDs the situation is different: you are stuck between invisible death dealers on the opposing side and invisible death dealers on your side, and instead of defeating the enemy yourself in a pitched battle you are waiting for an attack to happen at any moment and calling your death dealers for help eighty percent of the time.

I'm leaning towards the second explanation. WW1 wasn't exactly short of patriotism, so I think we can assume that returning soldiers would be in a relatively similar situation to Romans. The difference is that Romans didn't spend months sitting in damp trenches with constant explosions, with the knowledge that if one hits you, you'll either be ripped apart or buried alive.

Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.

As I've understood it, PTSD isn't caused by single traumatic events as much as by prolonged periods of constant high stress, fear of death and feelings of helplessness. Those things really only started to happen during relatively modern warfare.

Pre-modern humans didn't get much "PTSD" because humans are well equipped to handle individual high stress and traumatic events, such as a melee, as long as there it's time limited and there is a feeling of control.

Counterpoint being that the entire life of a subsistence farmer was high stress, fear of death and helplessness. Crop failures, disease, crime, and wars were pretty common. And if the crops are failing in your village, you know you’ll be at minimum very hungry over the winter, and people die around you and probably members of your own family could meet the same fate. Nothing you can do.

A huge difference for modern WEIRDs is that we approach the world from the perspective that life is supposed to be good with the troubles I mentioned (death, disease, starvation, warfare, etc.) seen as outliers and black swan events. And at the same time, the more ancient approach to life was that bad stuff happening is normal, and it’s best to just get on with it. Your fate was your fate. And feelings, while they existed and were acknowledged, weren’t the same focal points that they are today.

I’m personally fairly confident that our modern WEIRD approach to the negative parts of life are creating and driving a lot of mental illnesses, especially in teenagers. We teach, in my view, the exact wrong approach to trauma, and a very inflated view of what can cause trauma. Part of it is just how much we live life on easy mode, which interferes with the development of mental toughness. A terrible experience for a young adult in a modern, western city is likely to be fairly minor compared to the same child in Tudor England. Add in that we tell our young that bad experiences cause trauma and trauma causes permanent mental health problems. And we teach kids to focus on feelings and to set hopes very high.

I agree with much of your post but the initial part isn't very convincing imo. There is a massive difference between being worried about the occasional famine and sitting in a trench that is pounded by artillery. The life of a substinence farmer isn't high stress, it's almost constant low mulling worry.

Is PTSD, especially c-pstd very overdiagnosed today? Absolutely! But it's also a real condition mostly associated with post Napoleonic frontline warfare, that isn't at all comparable to historic environmental or social stressors.

Sort of. If helplessness is going to make an event traumatic, I can easily point to plagues, mothers dying in childbirth, famines, etc as all being particularly traumatic. Imagine being 10-12 and seeing baby’s first be heading in town with dad. Or your mom has a baby and bleeds to death while you watch. Or the Black Death killing a third of your village. And knowing that if you got it, they’d basically shut you in the house and brick you inside entombed in the house. Death in the medieval and renaissance world was common and brutal. Only maybe modern combat comes close, and even then, I suspect that the way normal deaths happen in modern times make combat harder. Death before 65 is a black swan for us.

Helplessness can make an event traumatic and it's a part of what is believed to cause PTSD.

I actually thought of bringing up particularly severe plagues as a possible comparison, with a major difference being things like things like very high levels of noise from explosions, artillery, gunfire, grenades etc, that probably would make severe trauma manifest in different ways.

Surely people were traumatised by the black death and things like plagues resulting from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, but they might not have gotten PTSD specifically because the circumstances surrounding the trauma and stress was very different, even if death levels were the same or worse than frontline combat roles.

Finally, the first major recorded outbreaks of PTSD did not coincide with people having gone soft in a cosy environment unused to adversity, violence and war. It was pre-penicillin, most people were still agrarian or working in industry under terrible conditions, in societies that were violent and regularly at war. What it did coincide with was the advent of modern industrialised warfare.

I'm very much in agreement with this. Kids need stress, and not just of the exam kind.

One of my less pleasant but ultimately pretty beneficial childhood experience was attending a summer Scouts' camp at age 10. I was a member of the detachment but the summer camps weren't mandatory.

Anyway, it was somewhat unpleasant, mostly because the level of discipline demanded was fairly high, and as a very pre-pubertal kid* I didn't even have any machismo motivation that helped later with unpleasant things like bathing in very cold water.

And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves. It was nothing dangerous or backbreaking, especially not for the smallest kids, but novel for bookish nerds.

The food wasn't the greatest usually, as you'd expect when the guy who is overseeing it is usually a teenager, and there's no real refrigeration apart from keeping stuff in a cool stream. We only ate meat once during the whole camp. Really helped with fixing my attitude to food too. I stopped being picky.

I remember I cried halfway through when the parents were visiting, but ultimately stayed.

And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves.

This sounds awesome how much per week do I need to pay for this getaway? $5000...?

Not quite the same as this, but some friends and I spent a week camping in the Smoky Mountains earlier this summer. The costs for food, gas, campsite reservations, firewood, and supplies came to less than $250 per person.

My parents paid cca $80 to have me off their hands for three weeks.

You understand the laboring part was only first five days and then 1/4 of the time ? Each scout patrol would take turns in doing the camp-keeping part.

If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.

I will observe that a number of successful youth development/leadership programs focus on (mostly-)safe, controlled "stressful events". Thinking of things like NOLS, JROTC, and various sporting and scouting-like organizations. It's usually pitched as building confidence, but dropping kids into the wilderness and showing them how to survive (and even thrive) in unpleasant or even hazardous conditions seems, from this angle, to be deliberately aimed to calibrate this hedonistat. I've been through things like this, and while it's not a controlled experiment, it didn't seem like it was Earth-changing at the time, I've come to appreciate those experiences more as I've gotten older.

If I were looking at data to reduce confounding with heredity, that might be a place to start.

It makes sense, and really I think there’s other “thermostats” in our brains. Like I tend to think of maturity as somewhat calibrating a responsibility and time-preference thermostat to near adult levels. There are some adults that for various reasons end up with theirs somewhat lower than the adult level. You’ll find these people not doing things that need to be done, doing things that put themselves or others in bad situations, or mishandling money or property.

Given that the generation of your parents' parents and grandparents created the world in which the two largest wars in human history happened, I have some doubts about whether they were any more moral than we are. Don't get me wrong, I think the fact that there hasn't been another huge war has much more to do with nuclear weapons than with morality. I don't think that we are necessarily any more moral than those people. But I also think that probably we are not any less moral.

fair take

This is, incidentally, why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers and the natural reaction was that stragglers were crazy and should probably be forcibly vaccinated. When the struggle had been getting enough vaccinations to cover even the poorer areas in various countries, hearing that scientists had cooked up an extra sciencey vaccine with a brand new mechanism was not a cause for concern but for joy and extra trust.

Same attitude applies to other topics - I once listened to an old local leftist lady recount how left-wingers of her generation couldn't quite always understand why the younger generation campaigned for more veggie food days for school meals, since her generation had campaigned for more days when meat was served in school meals, as one way to distribute the rising wealth.

Was your old local leftist lady old enough to remember the days when pellagra was a serious problem in the South? Wikipedia says it was widespread until World War 2 - and of course having meat in one's diet prevents the nutrient deficiency that causes it.

(And to return to the "we've recently become so much wealthier" theme, isn't it astounding that less than a century ago the southern states were so poor many people had to spend part/all of the year living on corn alone?)

Pellagra in the South was ended mostly via fortification.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446222/

He's Finnish, so I doubt it has much to do with Southern US nutrient deficiencies(where, as with all Southern US problems, one must first control for race- the black population lived in third world level poverty for a long time when we were wealthy enough as a society that it didn't need to be).

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.

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.

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.

Conservative UK Boomers were not trying to purge their political enemies, they were simply scared. Now you can certainly make the argument that they were wrong to be so badly scared (though of course age did make them more susceptible than younger folk), and you can certainly make the argument that the media et al was part of why they were so scared, but they were not calling for tighter controls and lockdowns and vaccinations as an excuse to purge political enemies. It simply does not pass the smell taste. There was simply no reason for them to want to do so. Indeed, unlike in the US, Conservatives were more likely to be Covid vaccinated than Labour voters.

And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take also suggests that they weren't using it to purge political enemies, again because the government was a Conservative one, and didn't even want to do the things they ended up doing in the first place.

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?

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.

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.

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. The government may have targetted those ignoring/against mandates or rules after of course. 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. Like Prohibition wasn't put in place to target bootleggers, it created them, then the government cracked down on them. But it can't have been intended to purge bootleggers.

In any case, they were certainly not a threat to the government at all. Certainly not more so than hundreds and thousands of their own voters demanding action. 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.

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.

The government is made of MPs, who are very susceptible to pressure from their voters. The government wasn't the one driving the fear initially. Remember Boris getting a lot of criticism for being seen to just want to let Covid burn through the population? If he was planning lockdowns and mandates why bother taking that bad PR? It was the media and to an extent people themselves, social media plus the 24 hour media cycle amplifies everything nowadays more so than the past. Remember in the early days the government was downplaying fears, and discouraging the idea lockdowns would be helpful. They could have started lockdowns and mandates much earlier had they wished and indeed they took huge criticism for not doing so. They didn't accidentally stumble into lockdowns and mandates, those decided to do them of course. 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.

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.

To be clear, if you dislike the lockdowns and mandates, then the government and MPs are certainly responsible for their actions, pressured by their voters or not. They could have stood on principles and refused. And indeed some few did. But they didn't instigate lockdowns and mandates to purge anyone. They were blindsided by the publics reaction and then did what politicians will almost always do. To do something. Which instinct is to be very clear, responsible for a lot of very bad laws and very probably lockdown and mandates are far from the last we will see.

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.

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.

Internal discussions on deliberately increasing fear predate the lockdowns. "The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging" This is just what was openly published, too.

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.

Ok, so you would roughly agree lockdowns were driven by fear then?

But then why would you think the government needs vaccine mandates to target and purge anti-lockdown activists? It simply can. As you point out Parliament is sovereign. It can just pass a law to lock em up or use anti-terror mandates it doesn't need a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists. It doesn't make sense. Plus they didn't actually purge them!

As for dates, prior to March the Government was already getting huge criticism. Including letters from hundreds of scientists being published in the media.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/amp/science-health_coronavirus-outbreak_boris-johnson-steps-plans-tackle-coronavirus-criticism-mounts/6185847.html

Once they have decided to change tack, then messaging to increase compliance will be used. That's SOP. But it doesn't mean that is WHY they changed tack. Pressure was mounting through Feb and into March and Boris had already gone stricter and stricter as you can see above.

The pressure was coming from voters and the media.

The reason I think its important to understand that is not to absolve government of blame. Because whatever the pressures, they could have chosen otherwise. Their reasons for doing so, don't impact on the morality. But rather because when the next crisis happens in 15 or 20 years with a new crop of politicians perhaps of different parties, then you might think it won't happen again. But as long as the same public and media pressures are brought to bear, and incentives for politicians remain the same I am telling you it will. Whether it is Labour or Tories or Lib Dems, or the Reform Party in charge.

But then why would you think the government needs vaccine mandates to target and purge anti-lockdown activists? It simply can. As you point out Parliament is sovereign. It can just pass a law to lock em up or use anti-terror mandates it doesn't need a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists. It doesn't make sense. Plus they didn't actually purge them!

For the same reason why they needed to promote fear to carry out lockdowns: The public wouldn't tolerate them without the prior propaganda efforts.

a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists.

I should have clarified this earlier, but when I said vaccine mandates were motivated by the opportunity to politically purge the opposition, this most clearly applies in the US, where vaccine mandates got way further than they did in the UK, mainly because our third round of covid restriction attempts collapsed from the partygate scandal. It's a shibboleth for being red tribe, and blue tribe leaders wanted to hurt the political prospects and economic power of red tribe by removing many of them from well-paid or prestigious employment or at least forcing them to betray their principles to remain employed. But then the conversation drifted to why lockdowns happened in the UK rather than the support for vaccine mandates in the US. But I'm sure you can understand why the idea of unvaccinated healthcare workers is especially corrosive to the government's narrative on covid and vaccines. That's still a political purge, just of the healthcare system first.

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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.

They lost seats to a party that wanted even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly. The simple fact remains that Boris opposed lockdowns. Many senior Tories did; there was more hostility toward lockdowns in the UK government than in any comparable Anglo country, and almost all of Europe, outside of some of the most conservative state governments in the US.

The Tories u-turned after all neighboring countries had implemented harsh lockdowns and after the press (which was normally quite pliant) began an extreme campaign of fear-mongering. 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.

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. In this context, they made a poor decision. It is worth remembering, though, that even on this right wing forum there were many people advocating harsh lockdowns.

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.

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?

Well, one difference would be that Covid interventions were supposed to be temporary, which they indeed were.

If the government was so gung-ho for lockdowns, why did it then eventually stop wanting them? There's a pretty obvious narrative for why the public fear abated - Omicron meant that pretty much everyone got Covid and it was quite mild, so the fear abated - but I've never seen a proper explanation from Covid skeptics why this happened (after and during many of them were mired in doomerism about how the lockdowns would just go on forever and ever or would be reinstated "right the next winter when the cases start rising again" when that didn't happen), apart from saying that some protests in a few countries led to a worldwide ending of restrictions, which would probably make them far and away the most effective protests in the history of mankind.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. Many MPs and the Public perceived that the reintroduction of restrictions was not motivated by covid, but instead to punish people for noticing partygate.

  3. 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.

If the government was so gung-ho for lockdowns, why did it then eventually stop wanting them?

Because people were turning on them in real-time?

But the thesis was that the governments were doing all of this regardless of the public opinion.

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 weren't checking for what people want most, and doing that, but I think they were checking for angry mobs with torches and pitchforks.

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And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take

Pretending to be forced is a pretty common way authorities do what they want while avoiding taking responsibility for it.

It is, But given my ex-position and contacts I can confirm that Boris et al, really did not want to. Not that Boris is principled, just that he thought it was going to make him look bad, due to the financial hit. We even have access to many of his messages as part of the various probes into parties at Number Ten at the like, if you don't (understandably!) want to take some internet strangers word for it.

I am not saying that Boris and the Conservatives had a particularly ideological commitment against lockdowns, and mandates, particularly, just that most of the reports commissioned showed very little gain for considerable cost.

It's worth noting that those reports were accurate, but also that in the US(where age is not the principle political divisor as it is in the UK), opposition to lockdowns on the right was specifically driven by younger conservatives. Older conservatives often held views more similar to their liberal counterparts, although many of them now regret it.

why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers

Yes, but you're also explaining the "cuckservatism" phenomenon more generally. If trusting authority got them out of abject poverty, blindly trusting it to not run off a cliff (and destroy that wealth) is what they are more likely to do, and it's all the more important to them to lose gracefully rather than put up a real fight, and they teach their children to do the same. It's also why they think education (especially college degrees) solve everything. They can't think of the experts being evil or corrupt because in their time they weren't, and have no memetic antibodies against experts that become evil, especially if they perpetrate that evil in Boomers' favor.

People (specifically Americans) born after that time were starting to become more skeptical of that machinery into the '80s and '90s (as evidenced by popular media; government conspiracies and cover-ups were all the rage in the movies and books of the time). That skepticism has grown but slower than it otherwise would have; life expectancy is much longer than it was in the past (another thing they can thank authority and experts for).

The Boomers went through two epidemics about as bad as COVID and barely noticed at the time. Boomer enthusiasm for vaccines is a result of increasing concern with personal health and a shift towards trusting authority with age, not anything that happened in their youth.

Which two? The Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s killed only about a tenth as many people as COVID did in the US. Granted, the population of the US was only about 60% as large back then as it is now, and it is possible that reporting of deaths in one or both pandemics is faulty. But still, I figure that at most, the Hong Kong flu was "only" about a fifth as deadly as COVID.

the population of the US was only about 60% as large back then as it is now

It was also, on average, 10 years younger.

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.

Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".

In any case, no matter what you think about COVID, in my opinion the right-wing reaction to it was bad politics. I can't blame right-wing politicians much for it because in this case it was really more of a grassroots thing from the right-wing base.

Old people vote more than any other age cohort. Old people are also the ones most in danger from COVID. And as someone else pointed out, old people tend to associate vaccines with good things.

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.

Good point.

And far less obese and diabetic.

The population also smoked a ton, which helped to reduce the obesity rate but which probably didn’t help the flu fatality rate.

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.

Eh, no. The effect of smoking is inconclusive, the effect of obesity is quite large. IIRC a 50 BMI (which is also quite large) bumps up your risk about the same as 10 years of age compared to a 21 BMI.

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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? The ones I know grew up looking at parents and other older relatives crippled by polio, watched measles and such get basically stamped out, and universally considered covid anti-vaxxers to be on par with lizardman conspiracists.

The ones I know grew up looking at parents and other older relatives crippled by polio

You don't even have to be a boomer for that. I'm a gen X'er and a childhood friend of mine got infected by polio as a young kid (luckily with no serious long term effects). In a western country.

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.

In other words no.

I’m not sure Boomers were all that much more opposed to anti-vaxxers than any other demographic. According to Pew, 22% of Republicans aged 65+ never got the vaccine, and presumably many who got it didn’t care if younger people didn’t (anecdotally, I know this to be true among some of my family and friends, but I unfortunately can’t find good statistics on the subject nationwide). As of February of this year, only 24% of Republicans aged 65+ were up to date on their booster shots, which is a smaller percentage than Democrats in every age category. Both the earlier numbers and the current numbers are quite a bit above the lizardman constant.

/images/1725742879910966.webp

"He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world

Or it was something like encephalitis which only certain causes of which have vaccines. People regularly get TBE in the first world despite the existence of a vaccine.

TBE seems pretty rare in Europe.

Overall, for Europe, the estimated risk is roughly 1 case per 10,000 human-months of woodland activity.

And some countries have been able to drive the rate down over the decades.

In Austria, an extensive vaccination program since the 1970s reduced the incidence in 2013 by roughly 85%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis

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