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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   35138 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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I know you're not directly calling me out here, but I must say in my defense: I don't think I've ever claimed to be anything I'm not.

I'm neither a principled libertarian, nor a totalitarian statist, but I'm not just discovering the Federalist Papers for the first time. I've spent a lot of the last few years reading history from antiquity to modernity, and political theory from Rawls to Julius Evola. I don't think I've reached a point of equilibrium, but I do find a lot I agree with in the Classical Liberal tradition, especially in my recent forays into Mills and Locke.

But I have no idea where I'll end up once I fully digest all the ideas I'm considering, because I'll admit I think there are attractive ideas in a ton of mutually incompatible political positions. I'd tentatively say I'm a left-of-center state capacity libertarian, but my views are still evolving.

Fair enough. Our views are always evolving, and I definitely would have disagreed with my 2008-era self who was ecstatic about Obama being elected.

I think we should all be given the grace to consider many different positions and try, as best we can, to arrive at the truth. That journey will be different for everyone, and I'm willing to admit that my current opinions might be very wrong

That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?

That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?

Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.

I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.

If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.

I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.

I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)

but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates.

social pressure, through a vast complex of government influence, regulatory power, and money spending, is used to whittle down the group of people the state dislikes until those people are small in number and power so that they can be explicitly forced without a high cost

and then the state does just that

I am mostly with you except it isn’t clear to me it makes sense to vaccinate during a wave because that encourages vaccine resistant viruses ie original anti genetic sin.

Thanks for this. This is mostly my position too. The reason I asked is because I think it’s a pretty good Rorschach test for motivated reasoning. The strongest opponents of Trump’s overreach in 2025 were the greatest proponents of totalitarianism in 2020. Those people suck, frankly.

Probably where we differ now is on pragmatic grounds.

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