This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Mm.
Suppose we have the following two statements:
"There's nothing wrong with these acts or the communities that celebrate engaging in them."
"These communities were ground-zero for a plague that has to date killed an amount of people roughly equivalent to a world war, and the acts they engaged in and their celebration of those acts resulted in a highly disproportionate amount of what we know term super-spreading, particularly in the early stages of that pandemic."
Are these statements compatible?
Would you consider conservatives dangerous, due to their behavior in spreading the Covid plague?
Have you considered that part of why AIDS was so dangerous, was because we didn't really have the concept of "AIDS" back then?
I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague. But then, I observe that there were a lot of people who disagreed very strongly with my assessment, who called people like my own family members "plague rats", who advocated firing them from their jobs or even putting them in camps, or any of a wide variety of social or legal sanctions in between.
Meanwhile, I observe that Homosexual (and hard drug user) behavior appears to have had a very significant impact on spreading AIDS as widely as possible in the early years of the outbreak. The contrast between the treatment of those opposed to lockdowns or vaccine mandates for COVID, and those who for selfish reasons actively spread an extremely lethal plague as widely as possible is my whole point here.
My understanding is that from fairly early on, they understood that there was an infectious, lethal pathogen, and they understood that it was being spread primarily by homosexual practices and drug use. Further, my understanding is that some gay men intentionally spread it as much as possible, and more gay men staunchly opposed any restrictions on homosexual activity. Eventually this opposition was at least partially overcome, but by then AIDS was endemic.
Does that description seem inaccurate to you?
It really seems like you're focusing on the worst possible examples. This feels like blaming all conservatives for the tiny minority involved in school shootings. Do you really think you're learning useful things about the world by focusing on the worst 1% of a group? Do you feel that other groups should be held to a similar standard, even one's that you're a part of?
Just taking a quick look at an actual timeline here (https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline#year-1982)
Does that really sound like a group that's trying to spread AIDS and opposed to restrictions on homosexual activity?
9 months AFTER that safer sex pamphlet, science is finally confident that it might be sexually transmitted
Are you comfortable saying the same things about these groups as you are about homosexuals?
Going to another source: https://www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quilt
Does the AIDS memorial quilt really suggest a group that doesn't care about the consequences of their actions?
I don't get it - you seem opposed to lockdowns for spreading an airborne pandemic that threatens everyone near you, but you also seem to be advocating for lockdowns against a pandemic which only threatens sexual partners? What sort of quarantine actions were you expecting for AIDS? Do you really think "make gay sex illegal" is a reasonable policy position, and would you have also supported "ban all sex during COVID"?
For that matter, weren't there plenty of people selfishly spreading COVID? People who went to major events and caught flights, despite knowing they were feeling sick? Isn't that selfish behavior that we should want to punish?
That's pretty much the definition of what a "superspreader" is, isn't it? And the reason that term is now common knowledge is that, at least hypothetically, superspreaders can cause immense amounts of harm by spreading infectious diseases.
Well, let's roll out the comparison and see where it leads us. Roughly half of gay men in America died to the aids epidemic. What percentage of that number do you think died because they scrupulously avoided risky activities, and just got really, really unlucky?
Meanwhile for COVID or school shooting deaths, I don't think either correlate with Conservative behavior at all, though it is absolutely routine to see such claims made. Having seen such claims made, I'm backtracking the logic to a situation where there does, in fact, appear to be a correlation.
This standard has been applied to groups I'm a part of, and using false data to boot.
Did their efforts work? Not before the disease killed roughly half the male homosexuals in America and went on to be a global pandemic. My understanding of the history is that activists arguing for restrictions were outnumbered by those arguing for no restrictions until it was much, much too late, and even the restrictions they belatedly put in place were not enough to halt the spread.
The actual record of how the disease spread and who it killed tells the story. AIDS is spread overwhelmingly by risky behavior. If Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately contracting the disease, that tells me they're disproportionately engaging in risky behavior. What's the alternative explanation?
In the first place, it seems pretty clear to me that the lockdowns and the vaccines failed at their defined objectives. COVID was too infectious to be controlled, the vaccines were not terribly effective and had side effects, and top-down government mandates caused much harm for little to no benefit.
Despite this, those objecting or resisting absurdly massive and unbelievably draconian interventions into every facet of our lives were treated like antisocial scum, and in many cases had the resources of the state turned against us to punish resistance in any form. This was cheered by the Blue population broadly, based on widespread lies told by academic and government agencies, and the result was demonization of people like myself.
I am pointing out that the gay community was the actual epicenter of a much worse disease than COVID, and the individual action of the members of that community evidently played a pivotal role in the disease becoming endemic, resulting in dozens of millions of deaths. The disease was straightforwardly more serious than COVID. The actions taken to spread the disease were straightforwardly more objectionable, and the end result seems significantly worse. Yet the standard narrative I observe is that American Gays were the victims, and Lockdown/Vaccine Mandate opponents were the straightforward victims.
It seems to me that this narrative is built on a stack of lies, and so I am kicking at them to see what happens.
If you think the "coordinated meanness" deployed against lockdown/mandate opponents was appropriate, what was the appropriate level of "coordinated meanness" for gay men when AIDS got rolling?
If we're going to punish selfish behavior, I'd like to imagine we'd punish it based on fair and impartial standards, and not play tribal favorites.
...What's your guess at the average number of sexual partners per month for a Gay man in California or New York in the era immediately predating AIDS?
Alright, let's take a simple example: Australia.
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
(source: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/covid-19-mortality-australia-deaths-registered-until-31-january-2024)
It seems kinda baffling to say conservative policy didn't cause anyone to die when their policy decision caused the death rate to go 10x.
I think we can reasonably extrapolate from Australia to other nations: maybe not as extreme, but you can tell when conservative policies won out again and again, because each time there's suddenly a bunch more dead people. You can perhaps argue about tradeoffs, but that's not what you said. You said "I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague". I dare say policy decisions are a Conservative behavior
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
... are you really being intellectually rigorous here? If we take that 90% immunity figure at face value, it saved millions of lives. What side effects, exactly, are so severe as to compare to "millions of lives saved"?
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years. So Covid is twice as lethal per year. That's not factoring in the fact that we had 40 years of medical advancements to help us combat Covid, whereas we had absolutely no clue what AIDS was for the first two years. That is an absolutely huge difference in our technology and ability to respond - I imagine if we'd had the AIDS vaccine 2 years in, the story would be vastly different
(Also not factoring in that the US has been below-average for AIDS for decades, or that the worst-hit region for AIDS is Africa)
Your comparison is hopelessly confounded by the fact that Australia, unlike the overwhelming majority of countries which enforced lockdowns, is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders, which has far more explanatory power in explaining the country's low rate of Covid deaths than does the strictness of their lockdowns. It's true that Australia ended lockdowns in 2022. It's also true that 2022 was the year the country first reopened its borders after Covid. I guess you could say that these are "deaths caused by a conservative policy" - but are you seriously proposing that Australia ought to have kept its borders shut to immigrants and tourists permanently? All to prevent a few thousand old people dying from Covid every year? A significant proportion of whom, if not an actual majority, would have died of flu or pneumonia within the period if Covid hadn't got them?
The vaccines were very effective at preventing serious illness, but practically useless at preventing transmission. Users on this forum have been gaslit for years with politicians and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry claiming after the fact "we never said that the vaccines would prevent transmission!" but we were there and yes they did and we have receipts.
Not a like with like comparison. By a very wide margin, the vast majority of people who died of AIDS were otherwise healthy adults or young adults between the ages of 15-49 (https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids). By contrast, 75% of people who died from Covid were aged 65+, and more than 50% were older than 75 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge). For a very high proportion of these people, if Covid hadn't gotten them in the last four and a half years, something else would have. Thus your comparison fails from a QALY perspective. A young American man in his twenties dropping dead from an infectious disease is unusual; an immunocompromised 85-year-old dying of a respiratory illness is not even news.
The claim was "COVID was too infectious to be controlled", and here we have a very clear example of controlling it.
More generally, my point was that it's absurd to say conservative policies had nothing to do with the death toll from COVID, which @FCfromSSC seems to be rather rigorously denying ("I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague.")
It's impossible to discuss trade-offs if one side refuses to acknowledge that there was any actual price. We can absolutely discuss freedom -vs- death! But you have to acknowledge that it's an actual tradeoff, and not just freedom for free.
Fair enough, but that's a radically different claim from the broader "the vaccine wasn't very effective."
From what I understand, the initial vaccine approval didn't require any testing for preventing transmission, but later testing did in fact reveal that there was a significant drop in transmission: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/preventing-transmission-never-required-covid-vaccines-initial-approval-pfizer-2024-02-12/
Can you provide a source for a near-zero effectiveness there?
First off, I don't think people really reason via QALY that much. If elderly lives are worth radically less, why does murdering someone in their 80s carry the same penalty? Why do people spend so much money buying a year or two of life when they get cancer?
Second, AIDS largely killed people that took voluntary risks that exposed them to infection, whereas COVID was a routine workplace risk that people were forced to endure.
Third, AIDS hit in an area where our medical and communication technology was vastly worse - it took a year just to work out that it was sexually transmitted, and you couldn't just post that information on a website because the internet didn't really exist. Conversely, for COVID, we had a vaccine available to the public in like a year and a half!
With AIDS, avoiding it would have required not having any relationships for the next decade or two, because we had no clue how it was transmitted or when it would end. Failure to do so only risked your own health.
With COVID, you were asked to wear a mask and avoid big parties for a few months. Failure to do so placed everyone around you at risk.
I don't really see much of a meaningful distinction between "Covid was too infectious to be controlled" and "it is possible to control Covid, provided your country is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders and you keep your borders shut indefinitely". It's so telling that "zero Covid" types always fall back on the examples of Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate that of course lockdowns work at controlling Covid (and it's just a complete coincidence that both countries are geogprahically isolated island nations without land borders). Show me an example of a country which isn't a geographically isolated island nation with land borders which was able to control Covid with vaccines and NPIs. I'm going to assume we can't. Given that most countries are not geographically isolated island nations without land borders, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that, for 90%+ of countries on earth, Covid is too infectious to be controlled.
And insofar as you're labelling the decision to reopen the Australian borders a "conservative" one, we both know full well that if Anthony Albanese (Labor party) had taken office a few months earlier, he would have made the same decision. In point of fact, Albanese did take office in May 2022, and did not immediately reverse the previous administration's decision to reopen the border. New Zealand reopened its borders a few months after Australia did, a decision made by a Labor prime minister (who was previously, consistently praised for her aggressive response to Covid and "girlboss" energy throughout the Anglosphere), and saw the same dramatic spike in Covid deaths. Are you just defining "conservative" policies as any policies which do not pursue the minimisation of Covid deaths as a terminal goal, at the expense of all other considerations? Or are you only interested in discussing the relative rates of Covid deaths when you can blame conservative decisions for them, and studiously ignoring progressive politicians who make almost identical decisions in almost identical circumstances?
I never said elderly lives are worth radically less. You claimed that Covid is more lethal than AIDS, but this is obviously untrue for the simple reason that it is much easier to kill a sick elderly person than a young healthy person.
TIL the Internet was the first ever medium for disseminating medical information. In point of fact the CDC (among other bodies) ran massive nationwide campaigns throughout the 1980s intended to raise awareness of the disease and how to avoid catching it, as did various governmental bodies in the UK. There was a very brief window, only a few years, in which a person who'd contracted AIDS could legitimately plead ignorance and say they didn't now better.
Or, you know, wearing a condom.
Yes, we were asked to do that. But even getting massive buy-in from the public on both counts had virtually zero demonstrable impact on the rate of transmission of the virus. China was unable to control Covid even using vastly more punitive measures (like literally locking people inside their apartment buildings) than any Western government, even in 2022 after 90%+ of their adult population had been vaccinated. I mean, even in your preferred example of Australia, even while their borders were shut, people still died. Or are you claiming that Australia really could have gotten its Covid death rate down to zero if literally everyone had always worn a mask outside the home?
Well, no: it placed every old and immunocompromised person around you at risk. Most people are neither, and Covid poses little more threat to them than the flu.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link