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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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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't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns.

I can!

But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy

Sure!

not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?

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.

We could have chosen differently

And in fact, some countries, or even states, did. I feel like this conflation of COVID with COVID-response is a huge issue.