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I mean he was 100% right about all of that; history will not look fondly upon societys hysterical reaction to Covid, so… I think he took a lot of shit for “comi

I mean he was 100% right about all of that; history will not look fondly upon societys hysterical reaction to Covid, so… I think he took a lot of shit for “coming out of the closet” in that regard and he’s never been the same. There was (and apparently still are) a lot of incredibly sanctimonious busy body’s out there who absolutely loved the power trip Covid gave them and they were more than happy to harass, threaten, and be incredibly disrespectful to people who disagreed with the mainstream narrative. As somebody in the same boat as AvE, watching people who you knew and respected turn against you the way so many people did is pretty brutal and fucks you up pretty good. Honestly it was scary as fuck how so people completely lost their minds after being fed non-stop fear porn and propaganda. Lots of parallels to some pretty fucked up atrocities—I can now see how “normal people” can turn so evil and corrupt they’d kill their neighbors and families. Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions… I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death. Scary fucking shit. I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Thank god some people had the courage to speak out against it even if it cost them so dearly.

sieabahlpark 2y ago
[dead]
steve_adams_86 2y ago
Disagreement is healthy. What was unhealthy is that it was dangerous to disagree. People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice. A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and compromise would have landed us somewhere sane. Disagreement would have been part of finding a sensible conclusion. What failed was our ability to do just that. Somehow we totally blew it.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts” who refused to follow their own data, didn’t follow their own science and refused to acknowledge that society has millions of problems beyond one very single, very specific thing. And if we didn’t follow their edict’s or if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths. Heathy discourse was absolutely not allowed. You were either 100% on board with whatever crazy shit your local politicians threw against the wall or you were a pile of shit sub human scumball. Didn’t matter they had no definition of success, no long term gameplan, no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing… in fact it didn’t even matter that these experts and politicians didn’t follow their own policies, you were told to suck it up buttercup this is the “new normal” and it’s forever. I don’t think this is a “both sides have a good argument” kind of deal. What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all. History will look on this the same way as it did on Spanish Flu: Barely at all, even when it has valuable lessons for the next pandemic. The former told me that people would stop wearing masks very very quickly.
    - lc9er 2y ago
      I’ll never understand the people that want their offense at being labeled a “Typhoid Mary” to be taken as seriously as their anti-social, Typhoid Mary behavior.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Mm. Humans are social animals, I find a lot of things makes a lot more sense through that lens — shooting the messenger included.
      - aakresearch 2y ago
ben_w 2y ago
> Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions Someone here took exception to me saying that I have never had any trouble with wearing masks, went and left a generically threatening comment on my blog. > I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Are you still talking about the wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"? Because that's way out of touch if so. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  > wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"? And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention. Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context. And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted. Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard. They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard. Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else. > even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral. I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.
jemmyw 2y ago
> I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death Do you think it might be personal rather than anything to do with your opinions?
simianparrot 2y ago
What scares me so much about the Covid debacle is that despite all the information that's been coming out about how most of the restrictions placed on people -- like hindering people from gathering _outside in the sun_ -- and effectiveness of both pharmaceuticals and PPE's -- of which I won't name any because then I'll be booted out of here quite quickly I imagine -- despite all of this data, government hearings around the world, and respected studies. Despite all that, people still cling to the fantasy that it was comply or be complicit in the death of anyone who died from covid. You're absolutely right. It was and remains scary as all hell.
- josephg 2y ago
  Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds? If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine. But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that. If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.
  - simianparrot 2y ago
    Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight. Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.
Buttons840 2y ago
Wasn't a lot of the authoritarian concern around COVID based on the idea that "this is just the beginning, today they require masks, tomorrow they'll require implanted tracking devices"? I think history will look at the COVID years and see a remarkable and worldwide pandemic, and society made some rules to try to deal with it, some of the rules may have been a bit much, or poorly informed, but after a few years things were back to normal. I don't see COVID being more than a blip on any radar. If future historians analyze the history of authoritarianism, there will be lots of things more significant than the COVID years I think.
- likeclockwork 2y ago
  Conspiracy theorists refusing to wear masks, which grant anonymity, made me realize that these people aren't actually paranoid they're just contrary.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Good point. I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

sieabahlpark 2y ago

[dead]

steve_adams_86 2y ago

Disagreement is healthy. What was unhealthy is that it was dangerous to disagree. People who thought we should just ride covid out were, more often than not, simply unaware of the nuances of covid vs a cold or something similar. People who thought we should hide in our homes until it was eradicated were similarly unaware of the implicit harms of that choice. A healthy discourse with people willing to concede and compromise would have landed us somewhere sane. Disagreement would have been part of finding a sensible conclusion. What failed was our ability to do just that. Somehow we totally blew it.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago
We were all told to shut the fuck up and listen to a handful of cherry picked “doomsday experts” who refused to follow their own data, didn’t follow their own science and refused to acknowledge that society has millions of problems beyond one very single, very specific thing. And if we didn’t follow their edict’s or if we were to express any doubt of any kind, we were evil alt-right grandma killers who deserved horrible Covid deaths. Heathy discourse was absolutely not allowed. You were either 100% on board with whatever crazy shit your local politicians threw against the wall or you were a pile of shit sub human scumball. Didn’t matter they had no definition of success, no long term gameplan, no acknowledgment of the harms they were causing… in fact it didn’t even matter that these experts and politicians didn’t follow their own policies, you were told to suck it up buttercup this is the “new normal” and it’s forever. I don’t think this is a “both sides have a good argument” kind of deal. What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > What the Covid “side” did was abhorrent and history will not look fondly on them at all. History will look on this the same way as it did on Spanish Flu: Barely at all, even when it has valuable lessons for the next pandemic. The former told me that people would stop wearing masks very very quickly.
  - lc9er 2y ago
    I’ll never understand the people that want their offense at being labeled a “Typhoid Mary” to be taken as seriously as their anti-social, Typhoid Mary behavior.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Mm. Humans are social animals, I find a lot of things makes a lot more sense through that lens — shooting the messenger included.
    - aakresearch 2y ago

ben_w 2y ago

> Multiple people I knew and respected wished me a horrific death for expressing my opinions Someone here took exception to me saying that I have never had any trouble with wearing masks, went and left a generically threatening comment on my blog. > I mean god forbid anybody express any disagreement with perhaps the most authoritarian, unscientific power grab in human history. The shit that went down was pure evil. Are you still talking about the wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"? Because that's way out of touch if so. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

cruffle_duffle 2y ago
> wearing masks during a global pandemic that lowered global life expectancy by about 2 years, or to put it differently "killed between 1 and 3 times as many as the literal Holocaust"? And forcing people to wear completely useless cloth masks for years did almost nothing to change those numbers. Same with virtually every single other non-pharmaceutical intervention. Virus is gonna virus. You can’t stop it and even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral.
- ben_w 2y ago
  There's a reason nurses and surgeons wear masks, and it isn't fashion. And calling it "cloth" is like saying "silicon" can't take pictures or do maths — surgical masks (when real and not scams to rip off emergency government funding) are carefully engineered specifically to be useful in this kind of context. And we literally can and have made interventions that work on viruses. Even non pharmaceutical ones — that's one reason why condoms are so promoted. Several non-pharmaceutical interventions have been demonstrated to be effective for covid, specifically. Real masks — N95 for example, not generic 'cloth' — were one of the ones that reduced probability of infection, with different probability depending on if your were measuring "person has virus and wears mask, probability they infect person at 2m distance in 5 minutes?" or "person wearing a mask and doesn't have virus, chance of them being infected when standing 2m from an infected person without a mask for 5 minutes?" and all the other combinations and variations because stats is hard. They also work like this on influenza, IIRC, but not the common cold. That (not the imperfections) is on purpose, and is why medical staff wear them as standard. Hand sanitizer, which sold out, as I understand it that didn't help at all with covid, but the memes around it probably reduced something else. > even if you could it doesn’t make the means to do so ethical, legal or moral. I have yet to meet a militant nudist — you are, after all, objecting to being forced to wear something you dismiss as "cloth", which is what your clothes are made of — but PPE seems to wind up a lot of people. Condoms, to use a previous example, but also seatbelts.

jemmyw 2y ago

> I’m sure if we continued this conversation and it was allowed on this forum you too would verbally wish at my death Do you think it might be personal rather than anything to do with your opinions?

simianparrot 2y ago

What scares me so much about the Covid debacle is that despite all the information that's been coming out about how most of the restrictions placed on people -- like hindering people from gathering _outside in the sun_ -- and effectiveness of both pharmaceuticals and PPE's -- of which I won't name any because then I'll be booted out of here quite quickly I imagine -- despite all of this data, government hearings around the world, and respected studies. Despite all that, people still cling to the fantasy that it was comply or be complicit in the death of anyone who died from covid. You're absolutely right. It was and remains scary as all hell.

josephg 2y ago
Early in the pandemic we just didn’t know what the death rate from Covid would be. 1%? 0.1%? Or maybe 10%? How many people get long covid, and how bad is it? Does it kill the old or the young? What is the death rate for people who get Covid, and can’t go to hospital because there are no beds? If Covid were to wipe out 10% of the population, all the draconian measures make a lot more sense. Slow it down as much as possible, reduce pressure on hospitals and give scientists time to make a vaccine. But it turns out the death rate from Covid wasn’t that bad - and Americans would, in hindsight, largely prefer a 1% (or whatever) mortality rate over the inconveniences of masks, staying at home, and so on. But a lot of things weren’t obvious early on like they are now. We didn’t know that. If there’s another pandemic in our lifetime, there’s almost no chance society takes those preventative measures a second time. Let’s hope we don’t get something a lot more deadly.
- simianparrot 2y ago
  Locking people indoors with limited ventilation and no UV radiation is never going to be a reasonable approach. Why? Because UV radiation kills viruses very fast and thus drastically reduces their capacity to spread between hosts. Not to mention the obvious factor of air circulation in a near-infinite dimension thinning out particles per cubic meter within seconds. Also turns out fresh air is generally good for sick people too. So is sunlight. Studies on the coronavirus circulating showed this at the very beginning of 2020. And that’s just one of the anti scientific measures that were taken.

Buttons840 2y ago

Wasn't a lot of the authoritarian concern around COVID based on the idea that "this is just the beginning, today they require masks, tomorrow they'll require implanted tracking devices"? I think history will look at the COVID years and see a remarkable and worldwide pandemic, and society made some rules to try to deal with it, some of the rules may have been a bit much, or poorly informed, but after a few years things were back to normal. I don't see COVID being more than a blip on any radar. If future historians analyze the history of authoritarianism, there will be lots of things more significant than the COVID years I think.

likeclockwork 2y ago
Conspiracy theorists refusing to wear masks, which grant anonymity, made me realize that these people aren't actually paranoid they're just contrary.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Good point. I didn't make that particular leap, but it does also explain why none of the people "worried" that Gates put a microchip in the vaccines seem fussed about Musk developing an actual brain microchip.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]