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When I was much younger, the transformation of Poland into a free market democracy and reactions to it by the communist party remnants (turned social democrats) was quite fresh in my memory. I thought that leftists hate Reagan because he presided over the victory of capitalist America over the communist vision of the world.
Then I got fluent in English language and eventually American politics, and learned about many policies of Reagan that were quite disastrous, like kicking The War On Drugs up a notch. I thought then that leftists hate Reagan because he gutted the welfare state, broke a major strike (air controllers) and left the gays out to die.
These days I think that many of the things that Reagan was blamed for were inevitable, or rather that they were symptoms of larger trends not influenced that much by the presidency - that stagflation was the result of forsaking atom, and so the American civilization's capacity to generate energy stopped growing (I don't remember the details, but I remember seeing a group of charts that suggested that energy prices and capacity over the centuries are the answer to "why did everything started going to hell in the 70s"). And after reading the Salo thread, I don't believe that a Dem president would make a difference w/r/t AIDS - the public sympathy just wasn't there yet for this to get major funding, that required decades of positive propaganda. No funding means that PrEP isn't developed, which means that mostly nothing can be done.
(The viable solution would be to go full authoritarian and shut down the bathhouses, but no American president would do that. I think that for example in the USSR less gays per capita died of AIDS, mostly because homosexuality was much more seriously persecuted and so they had, ahem, less opportunities to get infected. That's some heavy duty tragic irony.)
Also, seeing people talk about Late Stage Capitalism I'm kinda back to thinking that many leftists do in fact have unprocessed grief over the collapse of the USSR and a miserable failure of their imagined future. Mark Fischer pretty much made an entire sub-school of thought out of that grief. And so they hate Reagan because he is the face of the triumph over their future.
What's the Salo thread?
This one probably:
https://archive.ph/2020.10.16-171741/https://salo-forum.com/index.php?threads/patient-zero-and-the-early-days-of-hiv-aids.3167/
Yep, that's the one. By the way, if anyone has a better, more mainstream source to read up on the history of AIDS crisis, I'm all ears.
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I really believe the current view-back of AIDS in the 80s is hysteria. What would the activists rather have happened? Gays were dying of a novel disease, the government opened an investigation, started spending money, and eventually facilitated a cure. Meanwhile, people were catching AIDS because it was a sexually-transmitted disease -- and nobody blames gay men for spreading it. Was the government supposed to tell gay men to stop having sex? And somehow, it all becomes Reagan's fault.
If you take the COVID response as yardstick, which many on the left still endorse, then the answer should be unequivocally "yes". While not the same as HIV/AIDS, I found the contrast between the "stay indoors/wear a mask/etc" response to COVID and the soft-touch response to monkeypox incredibly jarring. After large parts of the country were imprisoned in their own homes and dissent suppressed in response to a novel disease, the message to the gay community dealing with its own novel disease was more like "please consider at least getting the names of the men you have unprotected sex with, so that we can actually attempt some contact tracing". I wish I'd saved some tweets from that era, which feels like another lifetime ago, but my browser history is being uncooperative.
That said, it all seems to have died down, so maybe the monkeypox response worked, which is more than can be said for the COVID response. And perhaps that soft response was necessary to get enough gay men to come forward and get vaccinated, which cut off the transmission chains.
Of course the response to monkeypox was different from COVID. Monkeypox:
Obviously treating monkeypox as anything as bad as COVID would have been absurd.
Separately
The government has learned the hard way over and over again that that doesn't work. Both in abstinence-only education of teenagers, and the HIV/AIDS reaction of adults back in the 80s, telling people how to behave in private doesn't work. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Gay men did largely stop hooking up after it became apparent what was happening; monkeypox takes a while to present symptoms after infection.
You seem to be a little aggravated that the government got COVID wrong but you are.. also a little mad that they got monkeypox right.. because it feels unequal?
Something like that, because it shows that the correct thoughts were in people's heads and yet they still managed to get COVID so wrong.
COVID came first. So maybe they didn't have the correct thoughts in their heads then. The massive criticism they received during and after COVID seems like it would cause exactly this.
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They got it wrong because their "utilitarian" calculus was fundamentally compromised by tribal bias. When it came to their ingroup, Liberty was priceless. When it came to their outgroup, no punishment was too harsh.
Eh, the lockdowns and other measures applied to all tribes.
I think the most relevant distinction here is women. Namely, there weren’t all that many women dying from their bathhouse adventures in the 90s. So the men kept doing their high-risk behavior.
Covid on the other hand involved all of society, so the neurotics wanted to give it all they had.
Don’t blame utilitarianism for situations where it clearly is not being applied!
The monkeypox outbreak was a result of, to put it delicately, large-scale in-person activities being conducted during lockdown by the gay community. Monkeypox was significantly harder to spread than COVID, which means a monkeypox outbreak during a COVID outbreak very strongly indicates severe violation of the COVID lockdowns and other measures. I recall no enforcement measures of any kind being applied to these activities or the people organizing or participating in them. Did I miss something?
Likewise, the Mostly Peaceful Protests consisted of large scale mass gatherings that made a mockery of the lockdowns and other COVID measures. These were explicitly exempted from the COVID restrictions, despite those restrictions offering an amazing opportunity to restrain the extremely severe damage they would go on to cause, and despite those same measures being strictly applied at the same time by the same authorities to Red-coded groups like, say, churches.
Now, maybe my recollection is wrong, and I welcome correction. But the above does not seem compatible with "the lockdowns and other measures applied to all tribes". It looks like the lockdowns and other measures being applied in an appallingly biased, tribal fashion. COVID lockdown measures directly violated my civil rights, and the civil rights of my immediate friends and family members, while large portions of Blue Tribe enjoyed exemption as a class from those same violations.
You are showing signs of a victim complex.
The COVID lockdowns existed in and only in 2020. Monkeypox in the U.S. went from May to October 2022. The world was back to normal when Monkeypox happened; there were no COVID lockdowns or even distancing expectations to violate.
Yes, you missed that they self-locked down without being told by authorities and contained the outbreak by themselves. Sex parties all got cancelled and the vast majority of gays stopped hooking up.
I understand if, looking from the outside, you didn't see any of that. And I understand that you may resent that red-tribe was told how to behave and blue-tribe wasn't. But it's important that you not ignore the very rational reasons for the difference: blue-tribe self-locked down during both COVID and Monkeypox and red-tribe didn't. Red-tribe had to be told. Separately, Monkeypox is simply vastly more mild. Even the seasonal flu is more dangerous and yet there are no flu lockdowns.
No they weren't- you made this up. There was nothing strict about churches shutting their doors. It was voluntary compliance. Just like you made up the notion that protests had an "explicit" exception. They didn't. This, along with your mis-remembered covid/monkeypox timeline is why I assert that you are falling to a victim mentality- you are severely mis-remembering history to fit your pre-existing victimhood narrative.
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Oh sorry I meant to refer to the Covid lockdowns, no anything with Monkeypox.
While I agree that the Blue Tribe protests and permission from health authorities were extraordinarily hypocritical, that’s the only thing I’m aware of where tribal bias gave an exception. So I don’t quite grant your whole point, because most blue tribers weren’t actually protesting. If it were a general exception instead of the limited one then I would agree.
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I broadly agree with what you're saying, but I guess I was making a different point: if the government had done something like close the bathhouses, the activists would not be happy that something was done. I think they would be furious, and call it a proof of oppression. My experience is that older gay men refuse to think of AIDS as "just" an STD. And if you suggest that the gay community perpetrated the disease through risky sexual behavior, they can become furious. I don't think they can distinguish something like that from the idea that Christian evangelicals are saying they deserve to die and AIDS is the proof. I don't think they can be rational on this topic. If you broach these ideas to the younger generation, they'll just roll their eyes and refuse to hear what you're saying, in the way that people today internally cancel you for breaking a social taboo. But the older generation will understand what I'm saying, and immediately shut it out.
I don't think there's anything the government could have done that could have solved the AIDS crisis, and I don't think there's anything the government could have done that would have assuaged the gay panic at being outcast and broken and dead. Reagan is a convenient scapegoat.
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One of the effort-posts I haven't gotten around to writing is to compare the social narrative surrounding the AIDS pandemic with that of the COVID pandemic. The consensus narratives for the two are completely irreconcilable.
Please do this, I'd love to read it!
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