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If we get another pandemic under Trump and another round of global lockdowns, I will update heavily towards thinking that Covid was intentionally planned and the new one is too. Because that would just be a little too perfect.
If he slashes regulation on oil rigs, and we have some sort of horrible spill, would you assume Deepwater Horizon was planned?
Deepwater Horizon happened due to onerous regulations that crowded out terrestrial oil drilling in favor of offshore drilling, which is inherently less profitable and far more dangerous. A foreign E&P company (BP) outsourced its well driller to a firm that bungled the job and had lax safety standards. That sounds a lot like the circumstances behind the COVID-19 lab leak. Regulations caused the job to be offshored/outsourced… foreign entity screws the pooch…
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I do not think that you should update very heavily.
In one model, pandemics randomly happen with a certain rate, perhaps once every 50-100 years (though we might debate if the rate should scale linearly with the world population or not).
In another model, the deep state (or whomever) will engineer a pandemic timed to prevent Trump's re-election (not that he would be eligible again).
Both of these models explain the past data reasonably well. The deep state model might predict 50% for another pandemic (after all, they might try something different, nobody would claim that a lack of another Trump pandemic conclusively falsifies 'COVID was a CIA op'), while the natural rate model would give you a 4-10% chance, perhaps.
I have not calculated it, but I think that the update would increase the Bayesian probability of the deep state hypothesis by a factor of five or ten (if your prior was reasonably small).
If this is a 'heavy update' is debatable, the overall effect is largely dependent on your prior. If you have the deep state COVID hypothesis at 20%, then this observation will certainly push you over 50%. Personally, I have the probability that COVID was intentionally released by a state government (or a cabal of similar influence) at perhaps 0.3%. Most of that 0.3% are not linked to US federal politics at all, however. So even if I multiply the probability of the subhypothesis 'it was all done to thwart Trump' by a factor of ten, it will still be very low.
As an analogy, suppose someone claims to be able to predict dice rolls. I throw a 1d20, and it comes up at the predicted value. This will certainly favor the hypothesis 'that guy is a psychic' over the null hypothesis 'he is just guessing' by a factor of twenty. But this will certainly not be enough to convince me, because I started with a very low prior probability.
Bad model I'd argue, ignores agency of public officials.
Consider parallel: "terrorist attacks are random and happen at a certain rate. If a huge terrorist attack happens and the state seizes enormous powers, then starts warning about another looming terrorist attack right as they attempt to justify invading another country/win re-election, the dice roll probably just came up 20 again by coincidence."
Pandemics are now "in the tool kit" the same way the "terrorism alert level" warnings at every bus station were in 2003. And deliberate release/false-flags aside, "are we in a pandemic/at risk of terrorist attack" is itself a political decision: see the difference between choosing "we must fight monkeypox stigma and not let it change our behavior" vs "we must close the bathhouses for two weeks (forever) to slow the spread"
Wouldn’t they also have to consider public compliance? After 2020, I don’t think a lockdown is going to be allowed to happen. You won’t get anyone to abide the lockdowns even if it’s Cordysepts of zombie apocalypse fame and mobilized the entire US military to enforce it. It would be resisted and probably violently so. The government would have to be insane to try it.
Depends if it's a situation as unfamiliar as the first one, where medical establishments and governments were truly panicking. That fear is transmissible and I don't think there'd be that much resistance. If it's what looks like a repeat of Covid though, and there is less of a sense of the unknown, I do think people would likely resist.
Even at an unknown, the known negatives of lockdown are known — and the end dates given by the authorities are known to be suspect. If some government officials told you to lockdown for “two weeks” given what happened in 2020, very few people are going to believe that the lockdown is actually going to end within 6 months. They also know that they won’t get much in the way of support when the lockdown forces people into unemployment and to close businesses, or schools or forbidding social gatherings. And given that, and given the knock on effects of inflation and shortages, it’s going to be very very difficult to convince people to go along. Covid wasn’t exactly a nothing burger but it also wasn’t something that justified the extreme measures taken to slow the spread.
I think that when the situation becomes scary, everything changes. Another covid-style pandemic wouldn't do it, until and unless hospitals became overrun on a whole new level. If it was something much more horrific, I reckon you'd be surprised how quickly people's current bravado would disappear.
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You don't have to convince people to go along. Just send cops to close down the businesses.
Logistics would be a nightmare as you’d need cops on every corner to prevent defiance. Even at that, I’m not sure if it’s possible. There are enough hotheads with guns in America that if Americans decided to actually resist an order, you’d have to either back down or bomb cities like Gaza to do it. I’m not sure if even with the police and NG you’d have enough people to pacify 300 million Americans who want nothing to do with a lockdown. At the very least, it would take a lot of effort.
You don't need cops on every corner. They just patrol and shut down the businesses and chase people out of parks and such (just like they did during COVID). Hotheads with guns are irrelevant, there won't be enough of them and you can just have the cops shoot each of them with a rifle.
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No, people would fall right in line just like during COVID, and any that didn't would be forced in line by government force, just like during COVID. There might be some violent resistance in Red areas until some high-profile loudly-praised shootings of the resisters.
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I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
I can!
Sure!
This phrasing makes it sound like the response to Covid arose naturally from "the facts on the ground". But the response to Covid was a political and ideological choice. We could have chosen differently. There was no direct unmediated causal link between the actual effects of Covid and the measures we took in response.
And in fact, some countries, or even states, did. I feel like this conflation of COVID with COVID-response is a huge issue.
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