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For the practical minded; As you said the probability of this happening is very low, as low as other things that should spark a lot of worry of their own. Even with the increased probability due to social contagion of the times, it's still not that high.
However, even if that is too much for you. Consider raising your kids outside the Anglosphere, ik ik easier said than done. But woke culture is very much the behemot that it is only in the US,Canada and UK. It's not that far left identitarian rhetoric doesn't exist elsewhere but to a much lesser degree.
Anything to do with covid.
Untold amounts of suffering caused by literally shutting down the world for what exactly? To make sure 85 year olds can live to 86?
The magnitude of the irrationality behind border closures, mask mandates and vaccine passes is too much for me to process.
"To make sure 85-year-old can live to 86?"
Yikes, I see a sentiment like this and it makes me think it's not the left that is on the side of some kind of youth cult that disrespects elders but rather the libertarian right, which is just the entire American right it seems, even when they're not talking about wealth creation and entrepreneurship. There's a flippant, distinctly young healthy male attitude to so much of their thinking
The issue is not that old people are worth less, or some crap like that. It's that the costs here were borne by all of society, for the disproportionate benefit of a small slice of society. That isn't really cool.
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At the start of the pandemic, whenever I pointed out that Covid disproportionately affected the old and infirm and posed about as much risk to young people as the flu, the response from doomers was generally some variant of "Oh, so you think a young person's life is worth more than an old person's? (You monster?)" And I would hastily backtrack and offer some mealy-mouthed equivocation like "Oh no, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying we have to balance costs and benefits... weasel words"
Within a few months, my response hardened into a resolute yeschad.jpg
And honestly, I really don't think that anyone actually thinks an old person's life carries the same moral weight as a young person's. Go to the funeral of an 88-year-old person. Sure, people may be a little sad, but the atmosphere won't be significantly different from a golden anniversary.
Then go to the funeral of an 8-year-old person. People will be distraught. They will be tearing their hair out, wailing and gnashing their teeth. Likewise at the funeral of an 18-year-old or a 28-year-old.
There is no meaningful comparison that can be drawn between any of these and the funeral of an 88-year-old person, and it's absurd to pretend that there can.
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Young men make or break civilisations. They invent, fight, discover, innovate and destroy. There is a reason almost any “historical figure” who did something exceptionally good or bad is a man. A society that channels their energy to productive and creative forces progress. Otherwise the young men will find a way to express their innate energy in whatever destructive way.
Protecting the elderly or the women are secondary tasks of a society and should never come at the cost of telling young men to indefinitely stay at home, not aspire to anything, jerk off three times a day. Because then soon you will have no society left to protect the vulnerable.
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If we have to sacrifice 77 young person years to increase 1 old person year, then yes, I do disrespect the old, and their demands of everyone else to make disproportionate sacrifices for them.
It's not the old people making demands, at least in my experience. Whether it was my older family members or my older customers at work, they gave less of a shit than young people.
Exceptions exist, all the usual caveats, but that's what I saw.
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Obviously worrying but doesn't actually prove anything until you can parse out what the effects would have been if strict measures weren't introduced, which is to say what part is actually attributable to Covid measures and what to just Covid itself.
Just about the same as what already happened. Minus the economic and social ruin.
A cursory google search seems like this working paper (which is not peer reviewed) seems pretty controversial, and lots of the criticisms seem pretty reasonable. They are reviewing a tiny slice of the entire literature, and for apparently no good reason. They say they're looking only at studies using a diff-in-diff approach, but some of them aren't even doing that, which raises the alarm of cherry-picking, especially when a lot of the studies that receive the most weight are from ultra-obscure journals. One of the studies, which it looks like received the most weight of all is from a journal, called 'Sustainability', so rubbish that in Norway it was the among the first 13 journals to be rated as predatory, and is now not even recognised as an academic journal there, having been removed from the national register because it was just a 'gun-for-hire' journal that would publish anything if you paid them for it.
Valids points, and in no way am I saying this paper is perfect or irrefutable.
But I will say;
Control for mainstream/publication bias. The (scientific/)establishment consensus was that NPI's were effective. This was enforced with strong Big-Tech state colluded censorship.
Most if not all the papers that speak positively about lockdowns have similar shortcomings. The only difference is they don't get much if any scrutiny at all. You won't find 50 links "debunking" a popular just as flawed meta analysis as the one I linked.
I think mechanistically even bereft of any empirical analysis, the costs of lockdowns are far too much relative to their benefit. This can be easily argued for. see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051?journalCode=cijb20
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We know exactly what would’ve happened- there would be far fewer old people. How many fewer is an open discussion, but let’s not act like this was ever going to be the Black Death 2.0.
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I'll speak for the OP and say that there's really no point in litigating the Covid lockdowns again. They really are the ultimate scissor statement. To me, its obvious that the lockdowns were completely unjustifiable, failed at their purpose, and caused untold harm. A lot of very smart people feel differently, and I've yet to see anyone be swayed on the issue no matter how convincing the data. Personally, I doubt there's any data that could sway me in the other direction either.
If you can't answer "what would change my mind", there's not much point in having a discussion about it.
I was swayed. I was radically concerned about covid and pro lockdowns. I was reading Chinese news and told all of my friends that covid was going to be a huge deal back in the first december before it really showed up in america. To the point that my girlfriend said she was going to stage an intervention because I was taking this too seriously. My friends all thought I was being crazy.
Then when it did pop off I helped convince the business I worked at to go fully remote, and fled my city with my gf to live in a rural area (obviously my views were aided by the fact that I have the resources to do that and it wasn't a real hardship for me).
I was, for a LONG TIME, one of the most intense about covid safety in my social group. I was wildly cautious about my own exposure. I don't think I ever judged people who were less cautious, but that didn't stop me from supporting the more consensual lockdowns at least. And I certainly avoided hanging out with people who weren't extremely careful.
But my mind was changed entirely. Not necessarily by any argument anyone made. But as the months passed it became clear that covid was not the black death and that lockdowns weren't doing anything good. They only hurt the young to protect the very old. I watched people I knew get covid and saw that it wasn't a severe disease. And towards the end of the winter of 2021, my perspective had done a 180.
I fully recant my original position. My reaction was too strong, and the lockdowns, etc, did nothing but harm. I really regret my original position and feel kind of stunned by what it says about my psychology that I became so intense. Some part of me still does think "the big one" is out there in a lab somewhere, so it's not like I've fully moved on from the preoccupation with potential plagues.
Maybe but I live in a super blue bubble, and covid fanaticism has died out rapidly and is almost non existent now. Sure, you're supposed to get boosters and claim that covid was a big deal. But many don't get boosters (I don't and have successfully convinced my very blue family to avoid them). I have also found that saying it wasn't a big deal ever and that we made a mistake, has not made any of my friends particularly bothered.
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I'm with @f3zinker in that this sort of reply is so viscerally triggering, incites such a degree of anger, that I definitely don't trust myself to engage in a decoupled analysis of whether the suffering is a product of government force, propaganda causing panic, the mass hysteria of 2020 (including the Floyd riots and November election), or some combination of them.
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