This sounds extreme to say and I know it is uncouth and might invoke Godwin’s law, but bear with me here…

Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you or me can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that they willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise with a smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that things didn’t escalate to violence.

I mean for Christ sake, we have phone numbers people could call to rat out their neighbors family birthday party. We had police kicking kids and arresting people for using a playground. All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing. People I thought I knew and respected completely lost their damn minds. Many have yet to recover.

What these “experts” did to society is beyond the pale. Humans may have fancy shiny tools and “science” but we are fundamentally the same superstitious creatures as those who came before us 10’s of thousands of years ago.

Social ostracism and censorship is harm. Shutting down businesses and arresting business owners who refused to comply was harm. Wrecking supply chains and printing egregious amounts of money was harm.

Yes, violence was largely avoided. But it was still an extremely harmful period of time.

People seem to think that Germany went from sunshine and flowers to turbo-Hitler overnight; there was a gradual descent and it very definitely went through many of those states.

It should be a constant reminder to each of us that we are not special and we are not different - we could and very well may be whipped into a similar frenzy someday.

I think this thread is looking back at 2020 with seriously tinted glasses. There we were dealing with a deadly highly-contagious airborne pandemic with cases and deaths growing exponentially, which would have been hard enough to deal with without politicization. But it became politicized and all efforts to stop it suddenly faced a massive, deliberate, sustained political attack. Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration, victim complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was pulled out, every tactic was tried. There wasn't even a goal, as far as I could tell--it was just contrariness for the sake of contrariness: "My political enemies are FOR sensible public health guidance, therefore I must be against it!"

The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience, or to simply virtue-signal their contrariness to their clan.

And the US treated these attackers with kid gloves. There were pretty much no enforcement of any of the things the complainers were complaining about: No consequences for ignoring stay-at-home mandates. Few localities actually enforced business closures. Masking was up to individual businesses to enforce, resulting in little compliance. Throughout the pandemic, I could drive 50 miles in any direction from my city and find people out and about, maskless, businesses open, no measures being taken at all. The only thing that was actually enforced were school closures, and that's only because schools are run by the government.

Those two years ushered in this new era of consequence-free mass civil disobedience. And it wasn't even in service of anything--just performative contrariness.

I guess intelligence agencies also learned the sad answer to the question "If there were a grave threat to society, is it possible to use PsyOps to get society to ignore or even prolong it?" But then again, I suppose our reaction to Climate Change has already answered that question.

> There we were dealing with a deadly highly-contagious airborne pandemic with cases and deaths growing exponentially, which would have been hard enough to deal with without politicization.

Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?

Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.

The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.

> Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?

I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.

> But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague

I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.

>The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.

I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.

I will one up your anecdata with another anecdata. I was at a work retreat in the bay area about two months ago. Employees flew in from all across the country for the event. No one checked the vaccine cards and masks were optional. Single digit percentage of people were wearing them, including indoors. And my entire friend network is reporting similar experiences. These are all companies with "left leaning" work force, as one would expect in the bay area. So no, these are not outliers.

> No one checked the vaccine cards

On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.

You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").

Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.

Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.

Thanks for your story, but you should know: comparing Covid authorities to the Nazis could get you in trouble

Except people near you not doing covid theatre doesn't disprove the notion that some people treat covid as much worse than it is, while the continued masking requirements and other shit do disprove the notion that nobody is treating it as worse than it is.

You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.

Yes, you are noble and altruistic and people who disagree with you are stupid and evil. Come on.

Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration, victim complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was pulled out, every tactic was tried.

Like when Ron DeSantis was called a murderer for opening Florida's beaches (when it was well established that outside activities were extremely safe), or when parents advocating for schools to open were called white supremacists (when the predictable result of closing schools was that poor and minority students suffered most)?

The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience

Meanwhile, I learned how many people are willing to have governments literally lock everyone in their homes because of their inability to do any sort of rational risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis.

>all efforts to stop it faced an attack

Lockdowns, and the labeling of society into "essential" and "non-essential", occurred nearly everywhere with no debate at all.

The most basic freedoms guaranteed to us - the freedom of movement, association, free speech - were taken away from hundreds of millions of people who had literally no say in the matter.

What world were you living in where these restrictions were only nominal? They literally roped off certain sections of businesses preventing people from buying non-essential products. It was everywhere.

> it became politicized

"Politicized" is a funny word. When people talk about "democratizing" something, it is all "everyone's voices must be heard!" and "we all come together!" and sunshine and rainbows.

But when ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives try to use the political process to effect policy—supposedly the essence of "democracy," as I was taught in grade school… "How dare you politicize this issue! Stupid peasants, don't you know you are supposed to blindly follow every diktat of our unelected expert class! The nerve, to think government is supposed to be responsive to your desires"

That's because the political arena is supposed to have limits. Those limits in America are clearly expressed in restrictions on the state's power, in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

If ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives are all clambering to remove those limits during times of turmoil, we absolutely have a right to decry politics crossing a line it was never meant to cross.

That's a good way of putting it, even though I disagree with your implication that implementing public health guidance was the political "line" was crossed.

My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:

    "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."

The movie "Don't Look Up" really nailed how we now seem to respond politically to factual, observable crises, and how non-political facts become "politicized."

> fight the messengers of that reality

The "public health experts" are not angels of God, infallible messengers of Reality itself come down from Heaven to deliver the Gospel Of The Science to an unworthy populace. They are fallible human beings, they made many mistakes and their priorities don't always align with everyone else's. The inalienable rights of man, as re-affirmed in the First Amendment, give everyone the right to worship whomever they wish however they wish; I am therefore free to deny Saint Anthony of Bethesda's divinity as loudly and publicly as I desire.

As for the movie, I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed this review of it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...

Of course, democracy should never infringe on the inalienable rights of man, and any proper republic has mechanisms to limit the passions of the mob. I simply find it amusing that the same political movement that so often claims to want to "defend democracy" everywhere (voting rights for felons, making courts more "accountable" through court-packing, eliminating the Electoral College, etc) is also the one that does the most complaining about issues being "politicized" whenever the democratic process disagrees with the unprinicpled, unaccountable expert class consensus.

> I learned during the last two years is how many people are willing to throw me ... under the bus in order to avoid even

Cloth masks and social distancing did not seem to slow the spread. Some people who got fully vaxed and boosted got sick and are still getting sick. None of that stuff effectively protected people, and it caused harms. Those with at-risk medical conditions (maybe you) should take care of themselves by isolating to avoid those busses.

> There we were dealing with a deadly highly-contagious airborne pandemic with cases and deaths growing exponentiall

Since day 1 this thing was 99% killing older people or people with 3 or 4 comorbidities. Dont try to turn it into the black plague now.

Yes, some of these comments are talking like it's all in the rear-view mirror now. The consequences are still unfolding, and it's still a strong possiblility that they could lead to something very unpleasant.

I try to keep that in mind when I read responses with which I personally degree.

Behind every comment is an actual person with a valid opinion. I may not agree with it, but perspective is key.

Some have said you learn the most listening to a critic/skeptic

When I was a boy in the 1980’s I used to hear the phrase, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I haven’t heard it said in decades. As such, I find your comment extremely uplifting.

Even if the opinion is highly invalid, wrong, maybe arguably dangerous; the key that there is a person behind it is quite important. It's very easy to forget online, where you often only encounter one aspect of the person in one area.

We can see the exact same process repeating in Russia right now. This could lead to consequences far worse than the recent pandemic.

And the military was running pysops on that too: https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-social-media-psyop-military-rus...

And then there was this plan from 2019: "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...

The amount of rabid "let's go to nuclear war, it can't be that bad" immediately after the beginning was probably one of the scariest things I've personally witnessed.

A lot of it was also people calling for things while seemingly intentionally bot following them to their logical conclusions, i.e.:

1) "We need a no fly zone over Ukraine

and somehow not connecting the dots to that meaning

2) NATO jets shooting down Russian jets

which in turn leads to

3) A hot war with between nuclear powers

something that hasn't happened outside of a few border skirmishes between India and Pakistan

Weimar Germany went down pretty fast, actually. Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Reichstag Fire Decree was issued on February 28. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was opened for business on March 22, specifically for political prisoners.

'Gradual descents' can lead many directions, including into rebounds and revivals. Virtually all countries and political systems have suffered declines at times. Since periods of decline is a nearly universal experience, the leap from gradual decline to nazis is only moderately less tenuous than the leap from 'drinks water' to nazis.

There's no question that any course of action (or courses of action) taken in response to a new airborne pandemic is going to involve harm. That's not the question.

The question is: what public health policies will minimize harm according to some set of metrics, and what will those metrics be?

The harms you describe are real. But you offer no way to quantify these harms against the harms that may have occured without the policies you are objecting to.

Check what happened in other countries where such shit did not go down and you will have your answer. It was about the same.

Which countries are you thinking of? The lockdowns, mask mandates etc. in the USA were fairly mild compared to most countries.

> showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down

Gina Carano was fired from Star Wars for making that same comparison - not even denying COVID, just saying, "the holocaust happened because people turned against their neighbors".

She was fired for comparing conservatives to the Jews in Hitler's Germany, which is, at best, absurd.

Much more absurd were the news outlets and blue checkmarks calling her comments "anti-Semitic."

Absurd it was; but firing for an absurd comment is, well, part of how people are conditioned to invite things like the holocaust to happen

You're right everyone should be forced to continue to do business with people openly stating that they believe in a value system you disagree with. Any sort of action in response to someone's beliefs beyond a firm "tut tut" is directly on the path to events like the holocaust

Wait, are you trying to get fired now? Because that is an absurd escalation. It's almost like you know firing someone for saying something silly is wrong, and so you have to pretend it's a complete civilisational crisis to abstract away from that.

You act like the other side doesn't compare everything to Hitler and the Nazis constantly though lol

She also mocked mask wearing among other unsavory political tweets. Being a public figure in a Disney production does require some restraint on your public commentary. Disney does not like negative publicity from their actors and actresses.

Unless you're James Gunn?

Thereby demonstrating, unfortunately, that everyone who said the education about the Holocaust could help make it never happen again was completely self-deluded. Apparently we can just keep repeating history anyways.

We only teach holocaust history at a very surface level. Not enough to prevent similar things happening again. Not even close.

Yeah, America only has three of four years of mandatory Holocaust education right now, not nearly enough. We need 3 or 4 times as much at least. Why don't we have a mandatory Holocaust class every day of the week from 1st to 12th grade? We just don't take this issue seriously enough.

A few hours of lecture about the Cambodian genocide should be sufficient though. We need to focus more on the Holocaust specifically; that's the important genocide and the rest can safely be treated as footnotes in history.

/s

I don't think that epicureanideal was asserting that the Holocaust and the Nazi party in general was overlooked--merely that its coverage is perfunctory, glancing at immediate cause and effect rather than the deeper patterns behind it. I, too, am leary of over-emphasizing German atrocities surrounding WII--heinous though they may have been, there is no paucity of savagery in world history; however, I feel as though your reply is, frankly, a very bad faith reading of what bombcar posted.

He appears to be surmising that we're becoming very impulsive in quashing whatever thought appears to impede our immediate policy goals--not that it is the Holocaust in and of itself that is special. (He even goes through the effort of explicitly highlighting it as entirely feasible for a populace to fall to!)

> I don't think that epicureanideal was asserting that the Holocaust and the Nazi party in general was overlooked--merely that its coverage is perfunctory, glancing at immediate cause and effect rather than the deeper patterns behind it.

I have watched many films on the holocaust, and they were quite sad, and tragic.

However, I did not truly understand some of the why until I happened across the German Revolution of 1918–1919 [1] ; organizations, and elites, that played significant roles in the Revolution were the very same that were proscribed with the rise of the Nazis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...

No, actually human nature is just a constant, no amount of education is going to improve it by the tiniest bit.

Beyond the pale is if we started over with Covid XL right now, it would go almost the exact same way again.

Everyone would take up the exact same position they had, there will be a little attrition either side. Rabble on the internet all day long.

FEAR was made into a VIRTUE. The good people were afraid and did what they were supposed to do. The bad people vote wrong and we don’t listen to them anyhow. Same thing if we play it back.

There have been numerous statements along the lines of "we didn't crack down hard enough". Which would likely translate to more restrictions requiring less evidence. I'm sure the opposite side would aim for greater defiance.

The problem with both is we're talking "sides" and not "what should we do based on what we know?" There were far too many politicians involved, and they were all more concerned with appearing to be doing something on our behalf than actually acting in our best interests.

Don’t mistake that those are my opinions on how things should, just what was observed.

Consider why fear was made into a virtue. You said it, “our best interests“, then look at the lens of Covid, and define that. Who got to say with that exactly was? Can you see any scenario where “Considering who the virus effects, doing nothing special is our best long term approach” would have come out of the government and media?

Depending on who said it and how it was said, it could certainly have happened. It's basically what we did with the bird flu years before, and somewhat with SARS.

There may be an argument that if Covid was either more deadly or less deadly it would have had less of an effect.

Disagreements between opposing sides regarding the appropriate pandemic response wouldn't have been resolved by focusing on what we know. Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew. The disagreements stemmed more from differing values and priorities. And that's not even a problem which needs to be solved, it's just a reality of life in open societies.

> Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew.

Mine Safety Health Administration advice was to stay home when sick and then business as usual. I was on mine sites when others were locked at home double-masked with fear. Nobody was masked on mine sites because it restricts visibility and is unsafe. Do you think MSHA is a fringe group?

OSHA tried to mandate masks and shots. It was ridiculous to watch the disparity in responses and fear.

MSHA sites are dangerous yet are safe. The OSHA approach was incorrect.

In my observations, the people who are most afraid of Covid and most likely to “take it serious” are those who are white collar and privileged enough to not have to do hard labor. People who do shit for a living that can get them mailed or killed wrote Covid off a long time ago.

It takes an incredible amount of privilege to support the Covid mitigations. Consider that not a single person who enacted them missed a single paycheck because of the mandates. I imagine that holds true to most of the people cheering those mandates on or calling them “minor inconveniences”. A lot of privilege needs to be checked here.

Reminds me that “there are no starving people in Africa with gluten disorders”.

"Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew". It’s not my opinion, we "know" very little. We think we know because we read things on internet, we discuss with friends/etc but most of it is b.llsh.t as when we thought lobotomy and electrical shocks were sane and efficient treatments.

What fatality rate would a pandemic have to have in order for you to agree to the kinds of public health measures that were taken for COVID-19? 10% ? 20% ? 60% ?

What kinds of unknowns would justify, in your mind, those sorts of policies?

You can start comparing with _serious_ threats like Rabies (100%), aids (90%), smallpox (95%), tetanus (50%) Bubonic plague (40–60%). Yes in _that_ case I think maybe drastic policies would be justified.

Thanks for actually answering the question.

So what do you think your threshold is? If a new airborne transmitted disease with a 30% kill rate showed up, would centralized public health policies be OK?

What would you accept?

I'm inclined to side with the 1-3% mortality rate that came with COVID-19.

Fatality rate is the wrong point. Fatality rate among specific groups is what matters. In effect young people are at virtually no risk of covid, there is no reason to lock down kids for 2 years. Experts and authorities are running an ongoing farce.

Also, here are the cumulative deaths by age group in the USA so far:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

Precisely which groups would be isolated from "young people", and which would not, and on what basis? Do you judge the 44k deaths in the 40-49 cohort (likely parents of older children, along with teachers of many children) to be acceptable? Do you believe that an increase in their death count due to leaving children unrestricted would also be acceptable? Just how would not locking down kids work?

You're dodging their question. You don't have to agree with a number they picked at random, but is there any fatality rate where you would believe that the actions taken by the government in response to covid were justified?

In that scenario, the alternative is locking up the at-risk population, which would once again require a trade off of costs vs. benefits.

How about letting the at risk people decide for themselves what to do? Not a lot of old people want to die alone isolated in a nursing home with no visitation…. Which is exactly what we did. Let we tried to saved grandma only to (literally) kill her from loneliness and isolation.

Absolutely disgusting how many so-called “smart rational” people dismissed it… as if Covid was literally the only thing that mattered and anybody who pointed it out was nothing more than a Fox News watching selfish asshole.

To this day people will defend letting people die alone in a hospital or nursing home with only some crappy video conference as a substitute for real human contact.

It takes a special kind of monster to support the crap we did to the elderly. There are a worryingly large set of people I used to respect that turned out to be monsters.

While I agree it's horrific, I would urge you to reconsider whether or not people who supported such policies were monsters.

That's exactly the dehumanizing language that was used about people who were skeptical of lockdowns and other dissidents.

I think they were normal people who were overcome with fear and placed too much trust in authority. Weak-minded, perhaps, but that doesn't make them monsters.

It’s called the banality of evil. Monsters don’t have green fur and big teeth. They are ordinary people carrying out devastating policies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

> How about letting the at risk people decide for themselves what to do?

So I ask again, what would the circumstances have to be for "letting the at risk people decide for themselves" to be an unacceptable policy? What fatality level, transmission mechanism or whatever would have to be present for you to accept that some sort of centralized public health policy was required?

I’m not sure there should be a threshold. If the threat is real, like ebola, people will naturally adjust their behavior. If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable (covid lives saved), to the detriment of all other important considerations. This slippery slope should not be underestimated.

> If the threat is real, like ebola,

1M americans died of COVID-19. That's a real threat, too. So the difference with Ebola is not really to do with the "reality" of the threat, but the manner and rapidity of death, along with the fatality rate.

> If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable

I do not see how you can draw this conclusion.

> Not a lot of old people want to die alone isolated in a nursing home with no visitation…. Which is exactly what we did. Let we tried to saved grandma only to (literally) kill her from loneliness and isolation.

I agree with you, but we did worse actually.

Some states actually sequestered covid positive patients, and covid suspected cases at nursing homes with highly at risk populations.

We know who covid kills: People with advanced age and multiple comorbidities. The same type of folks you find at nursing homes.

Those governors that did that - in my mind they are guilty of murder.

For those of you that want to fact check this, I will save you the trouble.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/08/cuomo-sent-6300-covid-19-patie...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/9000-covid-patie...

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/five-governors-cuomo...

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/06/16/michiga...

https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/whitmer-orders...

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/murphy-administration-ign...

Superstition is exactly how I would describe some of these people driving around with masks on in their car with their windows rolled up... (and at this point pretty much anywhere really). I guess this is how superstitions start.

I used to do that. I did it at a time when we did not understand how limited surface transmission was. I didn't want to remove my mask after the weekly shopping expedition because there was some possibility that viral contamination of the mask surface could be a vector. In addition, I wanted to avoid wiping my hands near my mouth or nose, and simply leaving my mask on until I got home and could wash my hands thoroughly seemed like a good way to ensure that.

I believe that these type of disease are un-avoidable unless you live 24/24 in plastic suits. The trade-off is too high. I often see comments talking about mild inconvenience. Go tell that to people in china who are locked down and force tested, isolated, masked etc. To me it’s 1984-ish nightmare

Does it really have to be said again:

   FLATTEN THE CURVE

Nobody disputed that over time almost everyone would be exposed to COVID-19. The issue was how rapidly that happened, because if it happened too fast, public health systems would be overwhelmed, and then completely treatable injuries and conditions (under normal circumstances) would become potentially fatal.

In the beginning they had no idea how bad things would get. And keeping the hospitals from being overburdened was a big reason as well. Did they err on the side of safety, yes and thankfully it wasn't a worse virus. I have no doubt even if it had been deadlier people still would of done whatever.

I know right, can you imagine how many tigers I would have in my yard if not for all of my anti tiger rocks? I would probably be drowning in them. I just wish my neighbours had the humility to thank me for it.

I am reminded of this character study from 1941 about who goes nazi. https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

> Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you or me can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that they willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise with a smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that things didn’t escalate to violence....

> All it would have taken was some “expert” or politician to give permission to harm those “selfish grandma killers” and it would have been a whole different thing.

That's quite the leap, and frankly reads as self-affirming speculation (e.g. I was right, and the proof is in this fantasy).

The Washington Post[1] did seem to engage in a a bit of introspection eventually:

"The Post originally described Cotton’s remarks as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” in a February 2020 article. But last week, The Post rewrote the article’s headline, softening “conspiracy theory” to “fringe theory” and noting that scientists have “disputed” it rather than “debunked” it."

[1]"The media called the ‘lab leak’ story a ‘conspiracy theory.’ Now it’s prompted corrections — and serious new reporting." Washington Post, 6/10/21

>The Washington Post[1] did seem to engage in a a bit of introspection eventually

Unfortunately, this is a common tactic. Walking back a previous wrong assertion allows one to frame it as a virtue--"we corrected ourselves!"--in order to avoid talking about the original vice of being a copy-and-paste propaganda organ for the state.

There seems to be a very tight integration between the government and the major media, and this is a real problem. It's not surprising, as a journalist that is a burr in the saddle of government power soon finds it difficult to talk to government entities. But it is a problem if there really is no journalistic independence. In recent years, journalists seem to be little more than Twitter researchers. Complete randos from the Internet, some of whom were clearly a little bit mad, got closer to the actual truth than the "trusted experts."

One has to trust that the original intent was not malicious, otherwise the whole system falls apart. The leverage being used is tremendous.

The trust is not deserved, the original intent was malicious, and the whole system is a rotting corpse.

One doesn't have to trust that at all. One would be a fool to. If this is what the system is than it should fall apart.

Journalists without agenda barely exist anymore. You should assume malicious intent by default.

The issue was that the Post’s conclusions was an inevitable result of treating what public health authorities say as the truth and any heterodox voices as dangers to be silence. Introspection is meaningless if the post fundamentally doesn’t see anything wrong with that model and I think there is actually something to be said about treating mainstream medicine as authoritative truth.

And a couple months later the US federal government published an official report stating that a lab leak was a possible source of the virus.

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...

A very small bit.

Readers aren't parsing sentences this closely and comparing to previous statements.

Unless they come out with an editorial statement apologizing then they aren't really serious about their own involvement in censorship on behalf of those in power.

i think a retraction or minor edit after 99.9% of the readerbase has consumed the content, is too little, too late.

Damage done.

What do you mean by rewrote? Are you saying the Washingtgon Post published article calling a position a "fringe theory" which a previous, entirely different, article they published referred to as a "conspiracy theory"? Or are you saying they edited a single article, changing the text "conspiracy theory" to "fringe theory"?

In case it wasn't clear, it is a quote from a Washington Post article, which in turn describes how this (previous) article was edited/corrected:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...

> In an article published Thursday, economist Jeffrey Sachs called for an independent investigation of information held by U.S.-based institutions that could shed light on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sachs and his co-author, Neil Harrison, a Columbia University professor of molecular pharmacology and therapeutics, said that federal agencies and universities possess evidence that has not been adequately reviewed, including virus databases, biological samples, viral sequences, email communications, and laboratory notebooks. Sachs and Harrison also highlighted a tantalizing scientific detail that may be an indication that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, originated in a laboratory: a sequence of eight amino acids on a critical part of the virus’s spike protein that is identical to an amino acid sequence found in cells that line human airways [1]

If the Lancet Covid Commission is now claiming it is one of the foremost theories, then it is not fringe.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-evidence-...

Looks like they made the edit clear with a correction note, however they have left that undated.

More of these are in order,

https://fee.org/articles/we-failed-danish-newspaper-apologiz...

Corrections get much less visibility than original accusations.

that's a solid distinction, dispute vs debunk. That's a keeper.

This misrepresents what happened and what was said. Which is easy to do.

From April 2: "The prime suspect is ‘natural’ transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.”"

Couple that with the admission from Cotton: "Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated [from the lab]"

Numerous experts in the field backed up the idea that the virus was engineered or came from a lab.

Even Cotton followed up with further clarification of his original tweets.

"I am pleased to hear you now distinguish between possibility virus was engineered bioweapon (which can be dismissed) and possibility virus entered human population through lab accident (which cannot--and should not--be dismissed)" - From Feb 16, 2020 (referenced in Feb 17, 2020 in Washington Post.

This timeline covers it well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...

Is it bad that people update their thinking when new evidence presents itself? No.

But that doesn't mean people who pushed an idea without evidence should be lauded. A broken clock is right twice a day, after all.

> The fear and groupthink was so strong at the time that even pointing out the existence of dissenting voices was enough to get you labeled as a selfish grandma killer conspiracy theorist.

Yeah, and same if you discussed it on HN.

Oh, the intense discussions just pointing out the Norwegian health authorities’ rationale for abandoning the AstraZeneca vaccine. The loud and certain statements that it was all based on selection bias.

It was a very interesting time to practice independent-mindedness, and get vivid demonstrations on how rare it is.

That's not true in my experience, I have been able to discuss those things many times they came up and usually received upvotes (or at least more upvotes than downvotes).

Yes, that's anecdata, so make of it what you will.

I was downvoted several times on HN for pointing out that reputable scientists were being censored on YouTube and other platforms for their dissident views on COVID.

It happened here fairly often. Though less frequently here than most other places online during that time.

Unfortunately, there is a strong element of groupthink present on HN that downvotes according to party line.

The irony of this comment being downvoted is palpable. Way to prove them right y'all.

Except that it's not downvoted now. Jumping to conclusions about early voting behavior on HN causes (mild) embarrasment to many, and so it is once again.

"Things change over time" is hardly a profound observation.

It wasn't meant to be profound. It was meant to be correct. And it wasn't "things change over time".

Oh my! You were labelled as a selfish grandma killer! Heavens to Betsy! The sheer force of censorship! The utter horror of government-mandated labelling on social media!

Seriously. What do you think is going to happen when there's a worldwide pandemic and people with (in some cases) utterly opposing views on what is safe and advisable as public health policy?

Censorship of dissident medical views - many of which were later proven correct - during this period doesn't concern you?

I pointed out the existence of differing viewpoints being silenced, was shouted down, and you follow this up with mockery?

1. I don't believe there was "censorship of dissident views" - this is a framing I reject

2. I followed up the mockery with a serious point that you have not responded to.

You reject the framing that there were major differences of opinion in the appropriate public health policy to adopt in the presence of COVID-19?

Censorship? What the OP means by censorship is not what I mean by censorship. Were heterodox ideas etc. surrounding COVID-19 severely criticized? Yes. Were they even limited or deleted from social media? Yes. Were they still published in blogs? In various traditional media? Yes. Could you encounter them on cable news? Yes. Was anyone tried or even arrested for promoting or distributing such ideas? No.

That's not the way we treat the announcement of a lemonade stand, but it's also not what I consider censorship in any meaningful way.

What do you suppose this thread is, other than groupthink in a slightly different direction?

I’ve arrived at my conclusions all on my own. I’d love to be part of the “take this serious” crowd because it would have made my life a lot easier (but also wasted). Unfortunately the facts and data combined with my values just don’t align with the idea that Covid was ever something we should have shut it all down for.

There is an alternate universe where they didn’t test everybody that breathed and don’t publish daily death counts. The only way you’d know there was a pandemic was an uptick in “wash your hands” signs in the restroom. Otherwise it would have been “just that thing going around”.

The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock. No shutdowns. No masks. No hysterical blowhards tweeting about the end of the world on twitter. People just got on with life.

Does this make me a selfish asshole? Perhaps. But I personally think the people screaming to mask up and shut it all down are the true selfish ones. The expect everybody to massively disrupt their lives in order to appease their fear and anxiety. Especially when those mitigations had no prior evidence they’d work and not even a whiff of a stated off-ramp or end goal.

> The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm...

> The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.

Uh, "equivalent pandemic". I don't think so.

[ EDIT: Oh, and also: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-woodstock-pande... ]

Try adjusting for population instead of using raw numbers. Then account for the fact they test for everybody and anybody for Covid. Not so for the earlier pandemics. Totally different measurements. Imagine if they did the same test protocol back then like they did today. Only then can you compare.

The use and abuse of raw data has been a hallmark of the last 2.5 years. Whatever number makes Covid sound worse is the number that gets published and spread. Anything suggesting it isn’t as bad as predicted is buried as a conspiracy or “not peer reviewed”.

> Try adjusting for population instead of using raw numbers.

World population has grown by a factor of 2.3 since 1968. That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 230,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 1/4 of COVID-19's US numbers.

US population has grown by a factor of 1.65 since 1968.That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 165,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 17% of COVID-19's US numbers

Exactly, in reality we don’t know much about these diseases, the way they spread, the effects. But there has been some mass hysteria that made them appear much more serious than they are. It could just have made few lines in the media and everyone would have continued their lives peacefully. Instead we had borderline totalitarian policies, cops arresting people taking a walk alone in forest, ridiculous absurd policies (in France) banning non-essential goods to be sold in markets. I’ve never seen such a collective nightmare but now I perfectly understand past nightmare I learned in history books…

Fear and group think have not gone anywhere.

Society is “group think”. Try paying rent in bottle caps, and telling your boss to go fuck themselves when they ask for something. Fear of unemployment and homelessness make that unlikely.

City to city, coast to coast, group think and fear keep us from having serious conversations about consumerisms impact on the environment; don’t touch my capitalism click clack

The difference is that’s group think you’ve been conditioned since birth to believe is as immutable as the orbit of the planets.

If we all “group thought” more bicycles and fewer cars were more appropriate that’s what we’d produce. It’s unjustifiable belief to make it sound as if you’re a truly free agent unaffected by group think and fear of alternatives.

> The fear and groupthink was so strong at the time that even pointing out the existence of dissenting voices was enough to get you labeled as a selfish grandma killer conspiracy theorist.

My example would be one of the scientists on President Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS and pointing out that cloth face masks were not effective against an airborne virus, but n95 masks offered some real protection.

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-masks...

I, personally, saw people demand that links to that interview be removed as "disinformation".

Just watched the portion you're referring to, and based on what he actually said, that cloth masks are "ineffective" with zero qualification, is disinformation.

I see the concerns. He did qualify a few sentences earlier about the effectiveness of cloth masks is that there is some protection but it's small. Fine, but he was imprecise with his language later on.

People want to (and did) latch on to the quotable portion that they are not effective (read: zero difference from no mask), which is demonstrably false.

Cloth masks are effective against a virus with a droplet based spread, like the flu. When an infected person sneezes or coughs, cloth face masks can contain those droplets as they spray out.

With an airborne virus you have to be able to filter the air people are breathing and a cloth face mask that isn't even fitted tightly to the face just cannot do that. This is why you need an n95 mask or better fitted tightly enough to your face to create an air seal.

For example, the Measles also has an airborne spread and the OSHA requirements for medical professionals mandate gloves, eye and face protection, and respiratory protection.

https://www.osha.gov/measles/control-prevention

Note that Flu levels hit record lows globally while Covid continued to spread like wildfire.

>CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the world

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-seasona...

But the truly comical part, of course, was that Covid was not acknowledged to be widely airborne until a year and a half later. At the same time that cloth masks were widely dismissed as ineffective.

Are there any randomized controlled trials which show that cloth masks have a clinically significant effect in preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2? I haven't seen any such studies which would meet evidence-based medicine criteria, but if you know of any I would be interested to read them.

How would you design a controlled trial involving live virus transmission with a virus that is known to have long term health effects and can even be lethal?

There was one trial, which apparently later censored, that measured how mist with similar particle size behaves when it hits a cloth or other non-FFP2 or higher mask. Non surprisingly, they do not stop airborne particles that are much smaller than the "holes" in the fabric. The masks captured droplets, but later the droplets dried, split up and became airborne with very small particles.

Crickets.

It's a good placebo though.

> Which is demonstrably false.

If that's the case, be demonstrable then. Given the physical size of the virus vs the size of holes in say, a cotton mask, combined with the infection rates for the strictest masking areas, I would say your statement is demonstrably false.