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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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It was, for the vast majority of people, a glorified flu virus.

True, but at the same time, the flu can be nasty itself. Three people in my immediate family got (Omicron, I think) Covid: me - it affected my breathing; one sibling - nothing much apart from flu-like symptoms; another sibling - constant vomiting to the point of fainting and dehydration.

So it had different effects on different people, and while most probably did get away with nothing worse than 'a bad flu', there were also deaths from it. I think the authorities were unsure how to handle it, and veered between too optimistic (it'll burn through like seasonal flu) to too controlling (everyone in your room and no going anywhere for any reason). The latter pissed off people, especially when the authorities were merrily driving around the country and having unmasked parties for their five hundred closest friends while ordinary people couldn't even go visit sick grandma.

Hindsight is easy. If they had gone easy, there would be criticism that they should have instituted lockdowns and that would have stopped it early. If they didn't mandate vaccines, ditto. We have people saying the vaccines killed people, and I'm sure in the opposite case we'd have people saying lack of vaccines killed people. Whatever was done or not done, someone would say "they should have done this/not done this".

It's hard to handle a global pandemic. I think we need a reminder from time to time that Nature, for all our progress and prowess, can still wallop us around.

Had this happened in 1983, there wouldn’t have been nearly the hysteria

Speaking of 1983 - remember AIDS?

A 1981 report by what is now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes a rare form of pneumonia that is later identified as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS. It is the most advanced stage of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

I sorta kinda remember some hysteria around it back then? And it's still a pandemic, but the West has not seen the same continuing effects as the rest of the world due to retrovirals. If we still didn't have what is in effect a HIV vaccine, things might be very different. There were travel restrictions, among other measures, implemented in the USA and we still get political traction out of "it was a genocide" for the gay community around how it was treated or not treated back then:

During the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, LGBTQ+ communities were further stigmatized as they became the focus of mass hysteria, suffered isolation and marginalization, and were targeted with extreme acts of violence in the United States. One of the best known works on the history of HIV/AIDS is the 1987 book And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts, which contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to spread further and infect hundreds of thousands more. This resulted in the formation of ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) by Larry Kramer. Galvanized by the U.S. federal government's inactivity, the movement led by AIDS activists to gain funding for AIDS research, which on a per-patient basis out-paced funding for more prevalent diseases such as cancer and heart disease, was used as a model for future lobbying for health research funding.

...Publicity campaigns were started in attempts to counter the incorrect and often vitriolic perception of AIDS as a "gay plague". These included the Ryan White case, red ribbon campaigns, celebrity dinners, the 1993 film version of And the Band Played On, sex education programs in schools, and television advertisements. Announcements by various celebrities that they had contracted HIV (including actor Rock Hudson, basketball star Magic Johnson, tennis player Arthur Ashe and singer Freddie Mercury) were significant in arousing media attention and making the general public aware of the dangers of the disease to people of all sexual orientations.

...AIDS was met with great fear and concern by the nation, much like any other epidemic, and those who were primarily affected were homosexuals, African-Americans, Latinos, and intravenous drug users. The general thought of the population was to create distance and establish boundaries from these people, and some doctors were not immune from such impulses. During the epidemic, doctors began to not treat AIDS patients, not only to create distance from these groups of people, but also because they were afraid to contract the disease themselves.

Because the mechanism of transmission wasn't known, there was fear and panic about getting it merely from physical contact with the infected, or contact with things the infected had had contact with. If masking up had been recommended back in the 80s you bet people would have done it, and been vocal about calling for others to do it, as well as the hand sanitisers etc. approach to everything. Keep 2m distance in public spaces between yourself and another person in case they're infected and neither of you know it? Would have been happily adopted.

which contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to spread further and infect hundreds of thousands more

This is rather curious if you think about it a bit. I'm not sure exactly what we knew at the time, but knowing what we know now and what we did about Covid, the most effective thing that we could have done at the time to stop AIDS would have been to double-down on homophobia. Aggressively bust up gay clubs and meeting spots where the most promiscuous gay men would go to have sex with multiple strangers on a regular basis, shut down any mailing lists, newsletters, etc that were effectively used for the same, significant prison time for the worst offenders, etc. (Actually, maybe it's not such a great idea to lock up the most promiscuous gay men who might have AIDS in a prison with a bunch of other men... maybe you'd need a AIDS-only prison for them, then who cares if the end up spending all day humping each other, they've all got AIDS already anyways)

Last year I was in a pub bathroom and there was a sign hanging up giving advice for gay men on how to avoid monkeypox, a disease which disproportionately affects gay men. It was full of cheerfully unambitious and undemanding suggestions like "consider using condoms" and "consider only having sex with a small social circle" (as opposed to "every willing participant you come into contact with", presumably). Nowhere did it suggest that gay men should always use condoms, or avoid having casual sex completely for their own protection until a monkeypox vaccine had been rolled out - those demands would be far too onerous to make, apparently.

It's interesting to me that you can shut down every nightclub and bar in the country (including gay bars) for months at a time in hopes of preventing the transmission of a disease (a disease which disproportionately affects people who are so old and sick that they haven't set foot in a bar or nightclub for years, but whatever) - but the idea of temporarily shutting down gay clubs to prevent the transmission of a disease which disproportionately affects gay men (thereby protecting them from serious illness) is absolutely unthinkable. In fact I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that a public official who proposed this exact policy with this exact rationale would be accused of committing a genocide against LGBT people by denying them (even temporarily) a safe space. (How "safe" is a space exactly if going there makes you far more likely to contract an infectious disease than you would otherwise?)

The selection process for which policies sit inside the Overton window seems so fickle and arbitrary.

The selection process for which policies sit inside the Overton window seems so fickle and arbitrary.

If you think so, you probably haven't discovered the actual criteria.

Note that I said "seems".

I mean, locking them up and saying ‘they’re in prison for spreading a deadly disease by having gay sex constantly’ is a great way to get them murdered in prison.

Comments like these are why I come to this website.

AIDS was, up until we had treatments universally fatal, its transmisión mechanism and rate were unknown. If you got AIDS, you were going to die, and until we had a good idea of how it spread, people were afraid of it because they knew you died from it, and they thought casual contact spread it.

Also to point out the government response to the public in the AIDS crisis was to calm people’s fears. They very importantly didn’t hype aids. Fauci was a key player in AIDS. He didn’t go on TV warning people not to go outside because there was a scary virus, the hover was telling people that those with AIDS were not to be shunned and avoided.

This is a completely different situation than a virus with maybe a 1% chance of killing you if you were over 65, or had known serious health issues. For 90% of us, this difference between COVID and the flu was first of all the hype, and secondly the government response. We had the data — by march 2020 we knew enough to get a reasonable grasp of the death rate.

The government’s response to this virus is the opposite. Fear. Telling people that if they went outside they could catch COVID, that refusing to take the vaccination was evil. Forcing masks on people. Forcing every place that might be open to the public to either enforce masks and limit occupancy or close entirely.

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