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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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In a headline that say a lot more about modern society than I would like: Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time

In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date.

The article itself is quite fascinating, as is the original recording. Once again, we have a right wing partisan recording footage of a public health official saying things that should ostensibly be remarkably damning to both the speaker and the political bloc that installed him. Instead, the reaction seems to be quite muted.

Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?

Only partially related, but I'm still so mad at the covid collective insanity that took place. Can you believe there was a time when the Canadian CDC actually recommended that people use gloryholes to avoid spreading covid? And I've actually argued with pro-lockdown people who defend that recommendation as legit instead of denouncing it as insanity and bandwagon jumping. Multiple people I've argued with have said something like "well, just because you're sucking dick through a hole doesn't mean it's unsafe sex with anonymous partners". And this flabbergasts me.

In what world would people use a gloryholes that's safe and not anonymous? Gloryholes exist in adult bookstores. Did any people go modifying their houses, drilling holes into their walls saying "gee, I sure would like to have sex with girls I'm seeing, but I don't want to violate lockdown and be in the same room as them"? Did any guy tell the new girl he's dating (the one that he is not yet seeing steadily enough such that he would just include her in his covid bubble) that he wants to meet her at the adult bookstore so she could suck his dick through the filthy hole there without him looking at her face-to-face, so they don't share the same airspace? Women love being asked for non face-to-face sexual favors, while being in a separate room, being done through disgusting holes where random guys stick their dicks regularly, that never get cleaned, right?

To me this is up there with "racism is a bigger public threat than the pandemic" and promoting mask wearing when getting up from your restaurant table to go to the bathroom as terrible apologism to justify their own side's horrible behavior.

I share your frustration, anger, outrage that the craziness of those 2+ years were just allowed to pass and be forgotten. In Ireland (where I am) stories were legion of different rules for those in charge than the rest of the people. Old people were allowed to suffer, die and be buried alone, with no family contact, because of isolation regulations. People who refused to take a vaccine that was (let’s face it) experimental having been rushed through foreshortened clinical trials, were outcasts, prevented from entering any space where the vaccinated were. Apps and QR codes to separate the noble majority from the degenerate minority. It’s an enduring disgrace and it nauseates me that we’ve become too fatigued by it and too sedated 360-degree 24-hour screens to remember what went on. Therefore we’re destined to repeat it, and worse, at some indeterminate point in the future. It makes me sick.

[Edit: There’s so much crap about DEI but so much of what went on was its opposite. It was the preferential treatment of the old and the wealthy at the expense of the young and the healthy. That split has continued with further wealth transfers taking place since then via pensions and taxation. Spoke to a guy recently who, at 65, got his free medical care and discounted entry to the swimming pool and sauna while the hardworking and broke generation can’t afford either.]

To be fair, there actually are some gay guys who kink on gloryholes-qua-non, where it's about the informality and casual nature rather than either the anonymity or grossness/degradation. (Though the resulting kink is still very casual-sex-with-longer-term-acquaintances). Braeburned's probably one of the better-known artists in the furry fandom really focusing on it, but there's a decent amount both inside and outside of the fandom.

But it still wouldn't be especially effective at reducing COVID transmission even in that 'ideal' case, for pretty obvious reasons, and it still has other issues re: both COVID and STD transmission.

Off-topic slightly, but are the women at these parties presumed to be prostitutes? Or is it more like a "two couples who know each other met and had a crazy night" story which got blown out of proportion for sensationalist reasons?

He says it was his wife and their friends, so presumably a swinging thing.

I would think that “swingers party” would be the closest model.

The ruling class in America wants to put COVID behind them because they got to "work" from home, control others, their investments and homes appreciated wildly in value, and they still got to flaunt the rules when it suited them.

Other people missed weddings, funerals, their children fell behind in school, their mental health suffered and they lost businesses. But they aren't the ruling class, so their concerns are entirely ignored.

But don't mistake the ruling class being "over" COVID with the people who's lives they ruined being over it.

Flout, not flaunt.

To be fair, they did both in this case.

Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?

Whatever it is, it is US-specific. In the UK, officials who broke their own lockdown rules and got caught consistently suffered career-ending consequences. Partygate broke after COVID was "over" for us, but was still the multi-month-long all-consuming scandal that brought down a Prime Minister.

The full list of notorious fired lockdown-breakers includes:

  • Boris Johnson (Prime Minister)
  • Dominic Cummings (de facto Chief of Staff to Johnson)
  • Neil Ferguson (leading pandemic modeller at Imperial College and SAGE member)
  • Catherine Calderwood (Scottish chief medical officer)
  • Margaret Ferrier (SNP MP)
  • Matt Hancock (Health Secretary)

I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff. I think the British approach to elites breaking their own lockdowns was a lot healthier, and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.

I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff.

Many American politicians have figured out that you can just ignore this stuff and people will probably forget about it. If you're sufficiently shameless you're basically scandal-proof. Also, the structure of US politics makes it harder to get rid of someone. A minister can be sacked, a PM can suffer a leadership challenge, an MP can be kicked off the party list. In the US, an elected official is only really accountable to their voters, and that goes double for state officials. Re: Covid specifically, it helped that basically everyone was ignoring the substance of Covid restrictions anyway.

and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.

Reform UK wants to relitigate COVID and just won 14.3% of the vote. If anything the movement would be stronger if the state did not violently suppress it.

Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.

Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.

is a private limited company

Most small political parties are organised as companies because there's no other coherent legal structure for managing the finances of a political party. What else would they be? State owned? Not in a democracy. Charities? By law, they can't be tied to a political party. This talking point about Reform is intended to misinform someone with (admittedly typical) ignorance about what companies are. It's not a serious argument.

I know exactly what a company is - my day job involves managing a regulated Group with separately licensed legal entities.

I also know why the entities registered with the Electoral Commission for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are unincorporated associations, with the company set up to hold the asset being a company limited by guarantee whose members are certain elected officers of the unincorporated association.

The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none, and that Nigel Farage retained (literal and figurative) ownership even during the period where Richard Tice was leader and Farage held no party office. There is a reason why non-profit companies (whether or not they are charities) are usually limited by guarantee - the Koch-Crane feud at Cato being an example that was briefly famous in US right-wing circles of what can go wrong if they are shareholder-owned. Reform (and Cato back in 1977) chose to do the weird thing for a reason.

If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so. If Reform's owner decides that Reform should campaign on COVID lockdown blame, it is a sign that one man is doing so. Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media, it is more likely than not that the "substantial movement" he is representing is the one paying him - he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.

If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure and meaningless membership, then sure, that's an actual criticism. One that I'd also levy at the Labour and Conservative party, which have internal democratic processes in theory but not in practice. But you should just say that, instead of complaining that reform is a company.

Reform lacks much internal structure as it was a very small party, re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal. and only recently growing to a point where such an internal structure would be necessary. So already it's committed to changing structure to a company limited by guarantee.

Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media

GB News is not foreign media.

he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.

Political organisation against lockdowns was de facto illegal during lockdowns. This is about as surprising as finding out there were no pro-Capitalist parties successfully participating in Soviet Elections in the 1930s.

If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure

I don't have a problem with Reform - I support proportional representation because I think the way that excluding 20% of the population from meaningful political participation (whether that is the populist right in the UK with the globalists in control of the Conservative party, or the centre-right in the US with MAGA in control of the Republican party, or various left-wing equivalents) is bad for democracy, and that Reform should have more MPs than they do. I profoundly disagree with Reform and I am proud of the fact that my country is more resistant than most to their kind of politics, but getting along with your political opponents is part of living in a civilisation.

I think that Nigel Farage's decision to take up anti-lockdownism in 2020 was not the result of a social movement. You implied that it was. The presence or absence of an internal democratic structure in Reform is relevant to this question.

re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal.

This is incorrect. Reform was founded (as the Brexit Party) in November 2018 long before the pandemic. The name was changed during the lockdown, but if Farage had wanted to stand up a normal party organisation he had had over a year to do so. In any case, Alba (founded February 2021) was able to stand up a more normal political party organisation during a COVID lockdown (although, I agree, not a full set of local associations).

GB News is not foreign media.

GB News hit the air in June 2021, after Farage's attempts to run a US-style anti-lockdown campaign had failed. In 2020 his most lucrative gig appears to have been Fox News.

The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none

If this is what you were going for, your first comment was an extremely confusing way of going about it, and this is literally the last thing that would come to my mind from the way you phrased it.

If the lack of internal democratic processes bother you so much, you can just not vote for them.

If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so.

It's still a sign of a substantial movement doing so, unless you're saying he has the power of forcing people to work for him, and to vote for him.

That's an interesting comparison. Did any US politician or public servant face meaningful repercussions for flouting their own policies? Newsom is listed below as another example, and is being feted as a future president.

Nobody really cares. Normies are past Covid, regardless of their positions on the matter. The people who still wear n-95s everywhere have long ago gotten over public health officials ‘being irresponsible’ and the hardcore anti-lockdown crowd believes they already have enough evidence that the health officials knew Covid wasn’t that dangerous and were lying.

Under Lockdownism, the benevolence of COVID restrictions is treated as an axiom, not a conclusion. Everything else will get redefined and rearranged to conform to that axiom, rather than the conclusions being changed as new facts emerge. Therefore those responsible for creating, implementing and enforcing those restrictions are always good people regardless of their personal failings. If that means suddenly discovering that technically his restrictions didn't criminalize his actions, then so be it. The alternative, acknowledging that the hypocrisy of those imposing the restrictions is evidence they didn't really believe in them, opens the way for ulterior motives, and once you think those responsible for restrictions have ulterior motives, you're already half-way to being one of us evil conspiracy theorist granny murderering freedumb-loving fascists.

I don't know the specifics of the regulations across every little subdivision of the US at every point in time. So I don't know if he technically broke the law. In the UK, we de facto criminalized all casual sex, because we criminalized the act of meeting up with members of another household indoors (prostitution might have fallen under a work-related exception loophole, and dogging is technically illegal but generally treated as less illegal than violating lockdowns). The thing is, I don't particularly care about that. If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better. Breaking the law because you were kept from visiting a dying relative? Meh, doesn't indicate any particular attachment to human liberty, just a willingness to bend the rules in extreme circumstances. Violating lockdowns just to get your dick wet? Hell yes, we need more people who think like you in charge. But that's a +1 to Jay Varma's score of -100 for being responsible for the restrictions. There's little difference between wanting to see Varma fired into the sun, and me wanting to see Varma fired into the sun but I'll put him a few people further back in the queue for the sun cannon.

If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better.

I don't think that holds when you're the one imposing them in the first place.

Tophattingson is a single issue anti-lockdowner.

It doesn't hold because imposing them in the first place is, in my view, so bad that minor good deeds can't undo it. Not specifically because of hypocrisy.

Violating lockdowns just to get your dick wet? Hell yes, we need more people who think like you in charge.

Good to know I can count on your vote.

Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger?

The first one, most likely. Covid is done and unless you're highly ideologically for or against the lockdowns, some dude admitting that he violated the rules 3 years ago just doesn't do much. The nation's attention has moved on to the 2024 election. Moreover, it's hardly a new thing or unheard of, Gavin Newsom was criticized for this exact thing in 2020.

Gavin Newsom was criticized for this exact thing in 2020.

Newsom was involved in Molly-fueled orgies? I missed that one in all the other noise.

He attended a private party at an exclusive restaurant while his state prohibited such get-togethers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opinion/gavin-newsom-french-laundry-california.html

Remove the sensationalism of the orgy, and it's violation of the same principle.

No, he broke the lockdown and social distancing rules.

Is this...?

To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.

One can complicate this however much they want, the naked truth is that those officials have power and you do not, which is why they can burden you with obligations and you have no ability to do the same to them.

Note how Boris Johnson was not capable of escaping responsibility in this way. This should inform you as to his power relative to those of the officials who, de jure, work for him.

If Boris Johnson was not capable of escaping responsibility for his actions during 2020 and 2021, he'd be rotting in a damp concrete box for ~200,000,000 counts of false imprisonment, not just merely no longer be PM.

To be sure, but that's because he wasn't without power. He's just not in charge of things is all.

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