It's just weird to me how politicized so many ostensibly "scientific" topics have become.
When I was growing up, if you asked somebody whether alcohol, marijuana, or cigarettes were more dangerous to one's health, whether secondhand smoke was a significant risk, whether the "magic bullet" explanation was physically possible, whether human activity was going to result in disastrous climate change, whether to get vaccines for swine or normal flu, whether GMO food was a good or bad idea, whether nuclear power was a good or bad idea, whether to fluoridate the drinking water, etc. the answers you received were not dependent on some sort of tribal political litmus test. Offering a different opinion or level of certainty in your opinion was not something that would automatically get you ostracized from your political tribe. Basically, the average person's interpretation of ambiguous scientific evidence was more likely determined by his or her level of interest in and knowledge of the issue at hand rather than a product of the talking points delivered by his or her political tribe, recited as requirement of political virtue, and deviated from at the risk of personal demonization.
Most importantly, everybody generally respected everyone else's inherent right to interpret ambiguous scientific evidence differently. Offering a differing perspective did not automatically make you an evil or deluded person intent on implementing fascism, killing grandma, and destroying the planet. As a general rule, deviations from "consensus" establishment opinions were not even predictive of political affiliation.
Are all sorts of human activities environmentally harmful? Certainly. Should humans be better environmental stewards rather than rapacious capitalistic environmental destroyers? Certainly.
But is the average human's emission of CO2 an imminent environmental emergency that necessitates central authoritarian control of every CO2 molecule emitted by every human on the planet? If you actually think so, why don't we begin our "War on Existential Climate Change" in earnest by restricting the use of militaries, plastics, yachts, herbicides, and private planes? Instead of locking people into 15 minutes cities and personal carbon allowances, why don't we source things locally, ship things less, fix things instead of disposing of them, and make quality products that last for decades? I mean, if we are willing to use our government against ourselves personally, why not first use it to regulate the rapacious excesses of the worst environmental offenders among the corrupt oligopolies that we all agree are causing environmental degradation without making much if any positive contribution to the standard of living of regular people?
Every single time our establishment misleaders convince us of an imminent emergency, their prescription is to offload the entire responsibility for mitigating this emergency onto the average person while granting themselves increased authoritarian control to ensure that each average citizen fulfills his or her personal responsibility for mitigating the crisis.
How many of the well-meaning collectivists among us have even so much as noticed this blatantly obvious pattern? Sure, we all spent decades fighting capitalistic exploiters and polluters tooth and nail in the name of well-meaning environmental (and medical care) collectivism. But now that our establishment has so obviously perfected weaponizing that same well-meaning collectivism against us, shouldn't we at least be wary of handing them yet another supposedly existential crisis so dire that we all must be willing to serve up every right we have on a sliver platter in order to mitigate?
Just think what these same people have done to the Gaza, Lahaina, East Palestine, Ukraine, Flint MI, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., etc. etc. Weren't they great stewards of our environment in all of those cases? And now they are going to ride to our rescue by outlawing personal car ownership, curtailing our right to travel, locking us in 15 minute cities using license plate readers and facial recognition surveillance cameras, restricting our personal carbon allowances using CBDCs, and criminalizing our right to express our disagreement with any of the above policies based on our "consensus" state of climate emergency?
So far, I have yet to have anyone who demonizes any questioning of our supposed climate emergency as disturbing "fossil fuel propaganda" give me a straight answer to the following question:
Do you believe that the existential climate crisis we face justifies any and all authoritarian enforced austerity measures for regular people? If not, where do you draw the line?
Again, this to me is one of the biggest reasons why the failure of so many progressives to come terms with their having been marks for our TPTB con artists in terms of their endorsement of our technocratic authorities' "measured" responses to the COVID crisis is so important. Even after living though the incredible failure of authoritarian lockdowns, vaccine mandates, censorship, school closings, small business closings, and social media censorship to have any demonstrably positive effect on the trajectory of the COVID pandemic, a very large number of progressives still sincerely believe that had our authorities only done a better job at restricting our rights (you know, as they supposedly did in China), then we would have somehow "won" our self-destructive "War on COVID"! And even the more moderate among my former political tribe refuse to reassess their previous judgments that such measures were (at least by and large) wholly justified by the specter of the COVID pandemic.
Here is
Freddie deBoer's recent nuanced expression of this highly popular opinion:
I guess you would say that, in the context of 2024, I’m a Covid hawk. Maybe? It’s hard to say. I’m four-times vaccinated. (Pfizer, if you’re curious.) I have never regretted those decisions for a moment, in part because I’m willing to read the data and I’m not a deranged conspiracy theorist. I believed that the lockdowns were an appropriate temporary measure given the state of things at the time. I was perfectly happy to wear a mask during mask mandates, though I felt it was kind of nutty that some people insisted on masking outdoors or when they were alone in their own private car. In hindsight we perhaps should not have pushed vaccine mandates on the young and healthy, given what we now know about their risk profile, but public officials were making difficult decisions in the middle of a disaster. I think Covid was obviously a very deadly disease, even though it only killed a very small portion of the people who got it, and I agree with those that say there’s been a disturbing memory-holing going on with regards to a global pandemic that killed millions. It was a very big deal. I do, however, think it’s “was” and not “is.” Because the data tell us the pandemic is a past-tense phenomenon. And I think it’s crazy to suggest that that’s offensive to say.
I guess I should say that I’m part of the very slim portion of the population that believes that the world’s establishment governments and the United States specifically did a pretty good job managing an unprecedented pandemic. On one side, increasingly emboldened, are the hordes of right-leaning people who insist that Covid was a minor illness, that the vaccines were poisons ginned up by Bill Gates and Big Pharma to defraud the public, and that various restrictions on movement and behavior were simply a tool of leftist control. They think every death that occurs, anywhere, ever, is proof of the danger of the vaccines. On the other, increasingly obstinate, are the Covid dead-enders, the left-leaning types who have not been in a public place since March of 2020, who continue to douse their houses with anti-bacterial soap, who believe that the next big outbreak is mere days and way and who (and I am not exaggerating) think that we should today, in 2024, have lockdown policies in place as aggressive as those under China’s Zero Covid policy. (If you think I exaggerate, take five minutes to look around in the online spaces of the Covid ultra-hawks and see for yourself.)
At some point in the blogosphere days, “both sides” constructions became so thoroughly satirized that employing one is now déclassée, but I must: it is indeed the case that when it comes to Covid, there are crazies on either side of our culture war divide. I invite you to peruse the subreddits for people with ongoing extreme fear of Covid. I feel sympathy for those people, but it’s a sympathy derived from the fact that many of them seem to clearly be mentally ill.
I’m not suggesting that each side is equally destructive, nothing so crude. For one thing, there’s simply far more of the right-wing Covid skeptics than the left-wing Covid shut-ins; after all, there’s a greater personal cost to actually living the extreme Covid-avoidant lifestyle than there is to yelling on the internet about “the jab.” And the conspiracism surrounding the vaccines has become positively surreal, to the point that I fear it’s created the same kind of charged atmosphere that led someone to bring an assault rifle to Comet Ping Pong. The belief that the vaccines have killed vast hordes of people, thanks to guys like the addled omni-conspiracist Brett Weinstein, has grown despite the utter lack of evidence that any such thing has occurred. I had a particularly persistent emailer who kept insisting that I write about this supposed conspiracy, to whom I would just as consistently ask for evidence. His response was always to send me links to obituaries for individual people who had (supposedly) died of cardiac issues, with no proof whatsoever that those deaths were caused by the vaccine. Eventually he produced a crowdsourced spreadsheet, but it was more of the same - these people had named hundreds who had died of various cardiac issues, but not a single one I found could be responsibly attributed to the Covid vaccines.
There have been a few cases of myocarditis that have been linked to the vaccines, but every piece of responsible evidence suggests that they’re incredibly rare. The M.O. of the anti-vaccine cranks, meanwhile, amounts to “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” and to attributing any heart-related death to vaccines, despite the fact that cardiac issues have been the number one cause of death for as long as I’ve been alive. I saw an Instagram post recently that shared the news that former baseball superstar Darryl Strawberry had suffered a heart attack; predictably, many of the top comments suggested that this was the result of “the jab.” Darryl Strawberry is 62 years old; he’s Black, which carries with it higher risks of cardiac disorders; he has by his own admission lived a life filled with substance abuse and general hard living, which raises the risk of heart attack. But, nope - Covid vaccines exist, Darry Strawberry maybe(?) got one, like 800,000+ other Americans every year he suffered a heart attack, ergo he must have been the victim of the vaccines. If there are vaccine skeptics who are more responsible than this, they sure seem uninterested in combatting this kind of absurd reasoning. Nobody in that “movement” seems to have any interest in policing the relentless assertions of death-by-vaccine that crop up without a shred of evidence.
It’s true, though, that there’s also an ongoing kind of liberal denialism about Covid, an addiction to being the only serious people in class, that depends on a refusal to acknowledge that Covid is no longer a pandemic, that we are in most important ways in a post-Covid era. It’s an addiction not just to the fear of Covid but to the purity of the culture war of the height of the coronavirus, when everyone had nothing but time, time in which to yell on Twitter from the usual battle stations. You can see those problems clearly in this newsletter missive from Tom Scocca.
That deBoer actually considers himself part of the slim group of leftists able to reevaluate some of their previous excesses in their blind devotion to Branch Covidianism is highly problematic.
At this point, anyone who fails to recognize that the establishment response to COVID was an unmitigated disaster in terms of decimating the middle and lower classes worldwide, derailing the education of hundreds of millions of the most vulnerable children, transferring trillions in wealth to the top 0.1%, normalizing authoritarian micromanagement of social media, etc. is simply refusing to acknowledge that their fear of a respiratory illness (whose age of mortality was
always higher than the average age of mortality) caused them to wholeheartedly endorse the policies that directly led to all of this objective damage. For anyone in 2024 to believe that
"the world’s establishment governments and the United States specifically did a pretty good job managing an unprecedented pandemic" can be explained only by the intense confirmation bias of those whose outsized fears of COVID led them to make personal declaration after personal declaration that first demanded and then whole heartedly endorsed all of these intensely destructive authoritarian policies as they were being implemented. It was just more comfortable for a certain class of people to announce their collectivistic COVIDian virtue and then proceed to ignore any and all ill-effects caused by these (far too longstanding) policies because performing ritualistic ascetic practices as their response to a scary pathogen served to mitigate their fear while also appealing directly to their well-meaning collectivistic instincts.
If we can't get well-meaning collectivists to own up to being marks for our con artist establishment on something as comparatively trivial as the COVID pandemic, is there any hope for awakening them to the perils of what ascetic rituals and deprivations will next be required of them to remain virtuous in the already proceeding "War on Existential Climate Change"?
