The way that I remember the lockdowns is that no one spoke out because mostly they had no interest in speaking out. We all went home with pay and thought it was stupid but it was stupidity that somebody else was paying for, which anyone who works for a corporation has gotten very used to accepting quietly. Yes, they were stupid and destructive but it was a multi-month vacation for a lot of us. I knew that there were long term consequences but I didn't see how I could do anything from my position and I was content to sit at home and get paid for not finding a way to fix it. Of course, it was '21 and '22 when the bill started to come due and will be coming due for years, but selling the future to buy the present is a major hallmark of our society. Had some problems with the, now revealed to be insanely corrupt, Department of Labor but mostly the employment side of the lockdowns wasn't bad.
Now in Georgia, you could still do most things. We went to the beach. We did normal shopping and things just in a much less crowded and relaxed way. The part of the lockdowns that raised our hackles and made me start to care was the school closures and then the next year of sending students home if some dude on the bus had a sniffle.
I guess what I am saying is that a 'hard power' approach to censorship is not only unneeded but less effective than the soft way of just making people not want to speak out with either carrots or sticks. The Trumpian censorship of paying us not to make a fuss made the lockdowns was a success from the State point of view whereas the Bidenite mandates were an utter failure. Hard censorship is both unnecessary and ineffective. Only moronic administrations try it and they pretty much always fail. The soft censorship of decreased reach worked on conservatives for decades but the bans triggered a nearly instant groundswell of rage. Open suppression will pretty much always provoke an overwhelming reaction and it may be wondered if it is not often arranged exactly for that purpose.
So, to look more directly at Brian's thinking. We can categorize speech like this:
1)speech that is suppressed by government-only speech that is never helpful and always harmful should go into this bin and because of the blunt and headless nature of government it must be rather nonspecific and deal only with entire classes, that is broadly obvious categories of speech. is there any class of speech that is never helpful and always harmful? as long as we live in nations of 'laws and not of men' government should never regulate speech because their is no statutory way to specify speech such that only speech that is never helpful and always harmful will be regulated. In a hypothetical government where men of sense administered justice based on their own sense of right and wrong this might change. But that state does not exist.
2)speech that is disfavored by cultural gatekeepers or speech that is favored by cultural gatekeepers - this bin is administered with sufficient flexibility and specificity that it can sort out beneficial from harmful speech quite accurately. the problem that we currently have is that cultural gatekeepers have no accountability either to universal truth or to the nation as a whole. they simply favor what they are paid, in whatever form, to favor. thus, they favor the payors, private or governmental. it is highly necessary for society to be able to control speech on a gradient with a flexible and accountable mechanism. but like all tools in our hands corruption ensures that the wrong speech is favored and disfavored. hate the corruption not the gatekeeping. we don't need less gatekeeping. we need better gatekeeping. but if we can't get it we might have to settle for less gatekeeping. but as Brian says, this is a concession to our inability to do better. It is not an optimal and desirable state.
4)speech that is compelled by government- not sure that anything should ever go in this bin except testifying to a crime that you witnessed
Thank you for these great points. However in terms of the lockdown, there was social censorship. I clashed with essentially all of my "mutuals" on social media with my anti-lockdown posts even as early as February (anti stay inside) or in their pro-lockdown posts, pointing out that either decision is sacrifice, we are just choosing young instead of old which is crazy. And I would get DMs from agree-ers who weren't doing any of that, totally staying silent. But my circle was probably like me, in harder lockdown states.
"as long as we live in nations of 'laws and not of men' government should never regulate speech because their is no statutory way to specify speech such that only speech that is never helpful and always harmful will be regulated." - Of course, but this applies to all laws that go beyond the elemental things*, otherwise I would have included it in my summary of the problem (*and today applies even to these, hence Defund the Police).
The only really genuine example of misinformation that I can think of is 'passing off', eg mis attributing the source of the information in order to deceive the recipients.
Eg someone posing as a medical doctor on social media, giving information to desparate ill people and circumventing the relationship they have with any primary care providers.
In my ideal society the government that handled violent crime would be restricted to only doing that and no policing any non-violent activity. This basically decriminalized all non-violent activity. But threats and incitement to violence, along with inducing someone to commit violence, are violent crimes. So engaging in a propaganda campaign to advocate for forced lockdowns should be an arrestable offense. We should have no tolerance for speech that aims to violate people’s rights.
But every society has social sanctions on speech, and must in order to function. The problem is that most people have muddled thinking when it comes to the difference between the government arresting people and socially enforced social norms. But those social norms need to make sense. Our culture has been taken over by a harmful ideology. It was able to take hold because we had a socially open society that allowed free speech without strong social consequences. And now that the harmful ideology has taken hold it is converting society from open to closed by placing strong social consequences on any speech that goes against it.
We can’t just go back to being an open society again and not expect the same thing to happen. The problem is that we ever let down our guard and became open. If there’s a new ideology that some people want to try they should make their own community that tries it out and we can see if they flame out like a death cult or if they create a nice society that lasts over a century at least before being adopted by large numbers. We know that the old way worked, we don’t know that the new way will work, it could be better than the old way but it must be tested first.
It reminds me of Bird-box. The society has been infested with a parasite and is forcing the host to commit civilizational suicide. And those of us with minds still in-tact, when we try to speak up the brainwashed people attack us. The parasite is protected and the host is sacrificed.
The only solution, if persuasion doesn’t work, is to close ourselves off in communities of sane people and wait for the host to die and then rebuild. But that’s very difficult when the host has the full force of the American federal government and therefore the parasite has all that power to crush us.
I think that liberalism is dead forever. Once we become well again we must never let down our defenses again. We need a strong immune system. That doesn’t mean we need to arrest people for criticizing the government, but we should shun anyone who advocates for harmful ideas.
Agree with much of the above. And of course a lot of it comes from what gives societies a shared value of maintaining identity. I don't think secular American 'civic religion' accomplished this at all, it was too easily subverted by agitators and swayed by utopian visions. Societies need regular religion if new ideas are to be met with, 'no, we are grateful for the way it is now.' So a core problem is science eroding religion and how do we make them compatible.
The way I see it, the ideology of the covid regime created a kind of 'establishment science' of WHO, Fauci et al which usurped the true science of curiosity, discovery, and debate.
Worse still, the media fervently supported this ideology through censorship or extreme reaction to alternative views, eg the hysterical reaction to Swedens rejection of lockdowns.
Maybe the established religions are far from ideal, but they can provide a reference point to help see where society is moving from and to, and hopefully function as a bulwark against creeping tyranny and authoritarianism.
Yes, science needs to be tempered by religion. Scientists ask “can we do it?” Not “should we do it?” And we become spoiled by wealth and demand perfection instead of being grateful for how well society has been working.
Would you like to come on my podcast and have a long-form discussion on the topic? I feel like it would be interesting. Here are my links: https://linktr.ee/moralgovernment
I couldn't even wade through this nonsense - once you claimed that a graph somehow "caused" the lockdowns, I knew you were just rambling. Ideas don't have the sort of power (they're far more likely the EFFECT than the cause of anything; indeed, it's hard to prove ideas CAUSE anything ever, but they certainly aren't as powerful as you claim.). Had we banned any one argument for lockdowns, they'd have invented others, or simply dispensed w/ the need for excuses entirely.
In the real world, people in power want to do X; everyone else either wants to do X or doesn't care enough to fight those who do. Therefore, someone invents a reason X must be done - it doesn't matter if this reason is true or false, it just has to be a reason to do X. That's why intellectuals are such loyalists to the current thing (they're in the business of selling ideas to people who need them aka powerful people seeking to do horrible things). Obviously, there's some value to generating reasons (which is how intellectuals make $), but - ultimately - it's not that important as there's always somebody willing to sell some reason, and reasons will be found because the powerful want to do X and the rest aren't willing to fight over X.
I do think ideas matter, but it's more at the margins than anything; it's not like X could have or would have been stopped.
Once we created a centralized public health system, lockdowns & all other abuses were inevitable. Us idea people are only fighting at the margins.
If you really want to avoid COVID tragedies, you need to change the incentives - nothing else really works.
I don't think your model disagrees with my model very substantially. I show in Origin of Lockdowns that it wasn't people in power who invented "flatten the curve," it was a few random media personalities working solo; the government latched onto the phrase after it already blew up on the internet. There's no paper trail for any other interpretation. So you could say "people in power" saw FTC was useful and latched onto it in an environment of indifference. That's really just taking a different interpretation on mine (which says people in power really were just following, not leading at least until Biden and vaccines came up). Aren't we both blaming the "victims," i.e. regular people listening to stupid ideas, and rightly so?
So, with indifferent compliance to proposed reasons to do things being critical in your model, you nonetheless lambast my proposal that the graph caused lockdowns. But that's exactly what your model says happened. You can argue that another phrase without the graph would have been just as effective, so making FTC and the graph illegal to publish would have not have moved the needle on whether the streets of the entire west were empty on March 19. But even if that argument were plausible, a hypothetical government could just add "social distancing" and "safe at home" and showing scary hospital doom porn on the news to speech that is subject to censure. Why not, really. These are small efforts that could have the effect of saving 1-2 years of normal life from mass panic. In America we expect our laws to restrict the government, yet we don't have any legal solution for the news saying things that create demand for unrestricted government (while also eroding confidence in basic functions as I noted).
Free speech, with regard to covid lockdowns and jab mandates, was muzzled by pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer donates heavily to both parties in the US, they hire former FDA and CDC employees, they advertise on TV and in print media. This is also true of other drug companies. This is why the NYT and others and even "prestigious" medical journals are such whores for whatever is going to bring in the payola for pharma. Is that tyranny? Is it state power? I don't know, maybe only in the sense that the state is a front for Pfizer etc. So I don't go to NYT for news. I think Lancet is foul, so is NEJM.
Word got out anyway here on substack and other sites; we had freedom to call out the bullshit here and there. You just had to search.
Where are Stanley Plotkin and Paul Offit in the scheme? These are bit players with petty, almost laughably narrow self-interests who seem to have a vastly greater influence on media suppression of vaccine hesitancy than any pharma company, simply because they have folksy demeanors and are academics. It seems that there is a broad need to blame some overtly powerful entity, i.e. US gov, CCP, Israel, for the fact that literally a handful of random credential-havers can evaporate every right we pretend to be entitled to, compel all of humanity to do so and so. But that's the way it is. Trivially-achievable credentials have that much sway.
I suppose what I am trying to articulate, poorly, is a strong belief on my part that the extraordinary power of the FDA regarding vaccines (experimenting on all of humanity all the time) is so irrational that no industry can really exploit or exacerbate it. Industries only keep making vaccines because of NCVIA immunity. But you look at the budget that went to vaccines on the schedule, it's clear these things aren't being heavily invested in. And you have self-dealing. The eIPV which only had a few 100 kids in the trials and was self-approved by Albrecht and Modlin is a prime example.
This decision subscribed every American child of this century to 3x a Institut Mérieux / Sanofi product - why didn't Pfizer or any other American pharma industry step in to keep the money from going to a French competitor? It's better explained as Albrecht and Modlin being given essentially godlike powers to self-deal simply because nobody was paying attention.
And this is how the whole schedule is built. It's why there's no consistency in trial structure, understanding of correlates of protection, anything. In the Plotkin deposition the whole time it's like, "Well yes I get 100,000s to consult on vaccines, I'm the only person who knows more than one thing about them, and no one on Earth cares about this obviously ridiculous setup except this random dad, don't ask me to explain why." https://youtu.be/DFTsd042M3o?si=sRB-P2-A-Ed6WceW
I disagree with the idea that free speech gave us lockdowns. Any total lockdown i.e. closure of "non-essential" businesses, curfews or restricted hours, restricted occupancy, etc. can ONLY come from the use of force and legal coercion, which is the total purview of The State. Sure, some speech might convince some people and businesses from voluntarily locking down or staying home, but that itself has limits without the power of government. And I bet without that monopoly of force, people who initially might have been convinced of locking down would eventually and then completely let up. It is also the total control of the State that gave us vaccine mandates, forcefully for airlines and certain sectors, and corrosively for civil society by CDC/FDA guidelines.
Let me give you an example in the environment of the same overwhelming media speech and the believers of the public of "lockdown" of the difference when you have force vs no force: During the early days, spring to summer 2020, with real closures, restricted businesses from force they had no choice but to comply. However the call to "stay off the roads" had no force behind it. Obviously there was no way the government even properly define what that would entail even if they wanted to pass legislation, much less practically enforce it (e.g. how is driving to get groceries different from driving to go to the beach in terms of the act of driving itself?). Personally I found it an absolute joy to drive during that short time. And it was during this time that these misfits ignored the stay-at-home public speech without State force and broke the Cannonball record:
- money quote: "All of the Karens had stayed home"
Regarding lay censorship, as implied from above, ultimately it comes down to force and coercion, which in a free society derives from property rights (which itself derives from self ownership) Yes, different mediums and platforms and different people will censor but again like I discussed above, without total force or legal penalties or criminalization, that has very obvious limits and there will always be holes-- routes of free escape that the disaffected will choose, whatever your persuasion in civil society. You will see voluntary, recursive bifurcation of various sectors and functions of civil society when given the choice under increasing restrictions under any direction. Just witness the rise of Alt Media and alternative platforms and decentralized systems for those more technologically savvy.
In the last two weeks before lockdowns in San Francisco, every restaurant and gym was at quarter capacity (I went to restaurants and gyms every day, trying from the start to get natural immunity, which in light of B.1 and Delta being more severe was a good strategy; I don't know if I ever got infected before Omicron). Later Tinhorn Flats in Burbank was annihilated by the state - but when did any citizens show up to patronize it in defiance? Yes, the Western state's police are too afraid of the judiciary to not enforce draconian laws, that is real. But if we collectively disagree with the law and raise a stink then police enforcement melts away, as in the Floyd protests. Likewise, vaccine mandates followed widespread uptake. It's difficult to argue that the mule is pulling the cart when the cart always reached finish first.
I agree that the certain cases enforcement in the face of defiance depends on many factors of the local environment. In Australia and parts of Europe, people who've had enough of the more stricter lockdowns pushed back, in more defiant ways and yet, the government and police still had the will to ratchet up their force to shut them down. On the other hand, the Floyd riots showed the clear distinction between red vs blue cities (with an interesting exception in SoCal where even with some small conflicts, the response was much more muted), in racial perception, political correctness, and IMO with Trump in office. The irony is that people were not allowed to defend themselves against the mob in many cases, Floyd riots or not and police will go after those who try to do so. During this time only other minority groups were allowed to do so in fiery Chicago with a clear demarcation between blacks vs hispanics defending their shops and neighborhoods in certain areas (which reminded me of what happened with korean immigrants in los angeles during the rodney king riots when the police completely abandoned the area). Sadly this is not the case in San Francisco. I remember a case where an Asian shopkeeper was arrested for shooting a warning shot at thieves .Outside of truly peaceful protests on public property, really all of this just boils down to property rights, and violations thereof. Police just like The Science, are heavily politicized in reality. Coming back to vaccine mandates after higher uptake in blue localities e.g. vaccinationi cards or test status at businesses, certain events; well that again circles back to the same point on property rights if larger collective has the right to force others. (Similarly if we didn't have government policy dictating education, or public schools for that matter, at least part of the current culture war issue in the classroom would be moot)
Regarding treatment, I don’t think speech was helpful. Almost everyone made their mind up on the vaccines before criticism began. If someone had spoken up early, maybe - oh wait, Fauci did. Harris did. But all of this simply was evaporated from the media landscape by December and so there was no one speaking out where and when it counted.
Protests were punished for violating lockdowns, yes; until they weren’t. The difference was media support. They have always called tue shots in “peaceful protests,” it’s Lucy Football for just getting the government to understand what the media wants.
You could say, well imagine an alternate where a government in 2020 actually says “criticism of NPIs will be punished with jail until X” And as long as X extended the real date of NPIs ending, clearly speech suppression worsened things. But it’s hard to imagine the X exceeding the real date for blue states (~May 2022).
What I took from that, is that toxic femininity has sucked the blood out of men and tossed their shriveled husks aside. Be interesting to see who's next for dinner.
The way that I remember the lockdowns is that no one spoke out because mostly they had no interest in speaking out. We all went home with pay and thought it was stupid but it was stupidity that somebody else was paying for, which anyone who works for a corporation has gotten very used to accepting quietly. Yes, they were stupid and destructive but it was a multi-month vacation for a lot of us. I knew that there were long term consequences but I didn't see how I could do anything from my position and I was content to sit at home and get paid for not finding a way to fix it. Of course, it was '21 and '22 when the bill started to come due and will be coming due for years, but selling the future to buy the present is a major hallmark of our society. Had some problems with the, now revealed to be insanely corrupt, Department of Labor but mostly the employment side of the lockdowns wasn't bad.
Now in Georgia, you could still do most things. We went to the beach. We did normal shopping and things just in a much less crowded and relaxed way. The part of the lockdowns that raised our hackles and made me start to care was the school closures and then the next year of sending students home if some dude on the bus had a sniffle.
I guess what I am saying is that a 'hard power' approach to censorship is not only unneeded but less effective than the soft way of just making people not want to speak out with either carrots or sticks. The Trumpian censorship of paying us not to make a fuss made the lockdowns was a success from the State point of view whereas the Bidenite mandates were an utter failure. Hard censorship is both unnecessary and ineffective. Only moronic administrations try it and they pretty much always fail. The soft censorship of decreased reach worked on conservatives for decades but the bans triggered a nearly instant groundswell of rage. Open suppression will pretty much always provoke an overwhelming reaction and it may be wondered if it is not often arranged exactly for that purpose.
So, to look more directly at Brian's thinking. We can categorize speech like this:
1)speech that is suppressed by government-only speech that is never helpful and always harmful should go into this bin and because of the blunt and headless nature of government it must be rather nonspecific and deal only with entire classes, that is broadly obvious categories of speech. is there any class of speech that is never helpful and always harmful? as long as we live in nations of 'laws and not of men' government should never regulate speech because their is no statutory way to specify speech such that only speech that is never helpful and always harmful will be regulated. In a hypothetical government where men of sense administered justice based on their own sense of right and wrong this might change. But that state does not exist.
2)speech that is disfavored by cultural gatekeepers or speech that is favored by cultural gatekeepers - this bin is administered with sufficient flexibility and specificity that it can sort out beneficial from harmful speech quite accurately. the problem that we currently have is that cultural gatekeepers have no accountability either to universal truth or to the nation as a whole. they simply favor what they are paid, in whatever form, to favor. thus, they favor the payors, private or governmental. it is highly necessary for society to be able to control speech on a gradient with a flexible and accountable mechanism. but like all tools in our hands corruption ensures that the wrong speech is favored and disfavored. hate the corruption not the gatekeeping. we don't need less gatekeeping. we need better gatekeeping. but if we can't get it we might have to settle for less gatekeeping. but as Brian says, this is a concession to our inability to do better. It is not an optimal and desirable state.
4)speech that is compelled by government- not sure that anything should ever go in this bin except testifying to a crime that you witnessed
Thank you for these great points. However in terms of the lockdown, there was social censorship. I clashed with essentially all of my "mutuals" on social media with my anti-lockdown posts even as early as February (anti stay inside) or in their pro-lockdown posts, pointing out that either decision is sacrifice, we are just choosing young instead of old which is crazy. And I would get DMs from agree-ers who weren't doing any of that, totally staying silent. But my circle was probably like me, in harder lockdown states.
"as long as we live in nations of 'laws and not of men' government should never regulate speech because their is no statutory way to specify speech such that only speech that is never helpful and always harmful will be regulated." - Of course, but this applies to all laws that go beyond the elemental things*, otherwise I would have included it in my summary of the problem (*and today applies even to these, hence Defund the Police).
These are great points well made.
The only really genuine example of misinformation that I can think of is 'passing off', eg mis attributing the source of the information in order to deceive the recipients.
Eg someone posing as a medical doctor on social media, giving information to desparate ill people and circumventing the relationship they have with any primary care providers.
I thought the original was a bit meh. This follow-up is fucking extraordinary.
Thanks! - The original was written in an extremely trollish mood, triggered by Berenson's histrionics.
Then I'm surprised you kept it that together. Fucker can be super annoying.
He likes him his dopamine
In my ideal society the government that handled violent crime would be restricted to only doing that and no policing any non-violent activity. This basically decriminalized all non-violent activity. But threats and incitement to violence, along with inducing someone to commit violence, are violent crimes. So engaging in a propaganda campaign to advocate for forced lockdowns should be an arrestable offense. We should have no tolerance for speech that aims to violate people’s rights.
But every society has social sanctions on speech, and must in order to function. The problem is that most people have muddled thinking when it comes to the difference between the government arresting people and socially enforced social norms. But those social norms need to make sense. Our culture has been taken over by a harmful ideology. It was able to take hold because we had a socially open society that allowed free speech without strong social consequences. And now that the harmful ideology has taken hold it is converting society from open to closed by placing strong social consequences on any speech that goes against it.
We can’t just go back to being an open society again and not expect the same thing to happen. The problem is that we ever let down our guard and became open. If there’s a new ideology that some people want to try they should make their own community that tries it out and we can see if they flame out like a death cult or if they create a nice society that lasts over a century at least before being adopted by large numbers. We know that the old way worked, we don’t know that the new way will work, it could be better than the old way but it must be tested first.
It reminds me of Bird-box. The society has been infested with a parasite and is forcing the host to commit civilizational suicide. And those of us with minds still in-tact, when we try to speak up the brainwashed people attack us. The parasite is protected and the host is sacrificed.
The only solution, if persuasion doesn’t work, is to close ourselves off in communities of sane people and wait for the host to die and then rebuild. But that’s very difficult when the host has the full force of the American federal government and therefore the parasite has all that power to crush us.
I think that liberalism is dead forever. Once we become well again we must never let down our defenses again. We need a strong immune system. That doesn’t mean we need to arrest people for criticizing the government, but we should shun anyone who advocates for harmful ideas.
Agree with much of the above. And of course a lot of it comes from what gives societies a shared value of maintaining identity. I don't think secular American 'civic religion' accomplished this at all, it was too easily subverted by agitators and swayed by utopian visions. Societies need regular religion if new ideas are to be met with, 'no, we are grateful for the way it is now.' So a core problem is science eroding religion and how do we make them compatible.
The way I see it, the ideology of the covid regime created a kind of 'establishment science' of WHO, Fauci et al which usurped the true science of curiosity, discovery, and debate.
Worse still, the media fervently supported this ideology through censorship or extreme reaction to alternative views, eg the hysterical reaction to Swedens rejection of lockdowns.
Maybe the established religions are far from ideal, but they can provide a reference point to help see where society is moving from and to, and hopefully function as a bulwark against creeping tyranny and authoritarianism.
Yes, science needs to be tempered by religion. Scientists ask “can we do it?” Not “should we do it?” And we become spoiled by wealth and demand perfection instead of being grateful for how well society has been working.
Would you like to come on my podcast and have a long-form discussion on the topic? I feel like it would be interesting. Here are my links: https://linktr.ee/moralgovernment
I would be delighted. I am moving right now so I probably can't do it until the turn of the month chaos has ended.
I couldn't even wade through this nonsense - once you claimed that a graph somehow "caused" the lockdowns, I knew you were just rambling. Ideas don't have the sort of power (they're far more likely the EFFECT than the cause of anything; indeed, it's hard to prove ideas CAUSE anything ever, but they certainly aren't as powerful as you claim.). Had we banned any one argument for lockdowns, they'd have invented others, or simply dispensed w/ the need for excuses entirely.
In the real world, people in power want to do X; everyone else either wants to do X or doesn't care enough to fight those who do. Therefore, someone invents a reason X must be done - it doesn't matter if this reason is true or false, it just has to be a reason to do X. That's why intellectuals are such loyalists to the current thing (they're in the business of selling ideas to people who need them aka powerful people seeking to do horrible things). Obviously, there's some value to generating reasons (which is how intellectuals make $), but - ultimately - it's not that important as there's always somebody willing to sell some reason, and reasons will be found because the powerful want to do X and the rest aren't willing to fight over X.
I do think ideas matter, but it's more at the margins than anything; it's not like X could have or would have been stopped.
Once we created a centralized public health system, lockdowns & all other abuses were inevitable. Us idea people are only fighting at the margins.
If you really want to avoid COVID tragedies, you need to change the incentives - nothing else really works.
I don't think your model disagrees with my model very substantially. I show in Origin of Lockdowns that it wasn't people in power who invented "flatten the curve," it was a few random media personalities working solo; the government latched onto the phrase after it already blew up on the internet. There's no paper trail for any other interpretation. So you could say "people in power" saw FTC was useful and latched onto it in an environment of indifference. That's really just taking a different interpretation on mine (which says people in power really were just following, not leading at least until Biden and vaccines came up). Aren't we both blaming the "victims," i.e. regular people listening to stupid ideas, and rightly so?
So, with indifferent compliance to proposed reasons to do things being critical in your model, you nonetheless lambast my proposal that the graph caused lockdowns. But that's exactly what your model says happened. You can argue that another phrase without the graph would have been just as effective, so making FTC and the graph illegal to publish would have not have moved the needle on whether the streets of the entire west were empty on March 19. But even if that argument were plausible, a hypothetical government could just add "social distancing" and "safe at home" and showing scary hospital doom porn on the news to speech that is subject to censure. Why not, really. These are small efforts that could have the effect of saving 1-2 years of normal life from mass panic. In America we expect our laws to restrict the government, yet we don't have any legal solution for the news saying things that create demand for unrestricted government (while also eroding confidence in basic functions as I noted).
Free speech, with regard to covid lockdowns and jab mandates, was muzzled by pharmaceutical companies. Pfizer donates heavily to both parties in the US, they hire former FDA and CDC employees, they advertise on TV and in print media. This is also true of other drug companies. This is why the NYT and others and even "prestigious" medical journals are such whores for whatever is going to bring in the payola for pharma. Is that tyranny? Is it state power? I don't know, maybe only in the sense that the state is a front for Pfizer etc. So I don't go to NYT for news. I think Lancet is foul, so is NEJM.
Word got out anyway here on substack and other sites; we had freedom to call out the bullshit here and there. You just had to search.
Where are Stanley Plotkin and Paul Offit in the scheme? These are bit players with petty, almost laughably narrow self-interests who seem to have a vastly greater influence on media suppression of vaccine hesitancy than any pharma company, simply because they have folksy demeanors and are academics. It seems that there is a broad need to blame some overtly powerful entity, i.e. US gov, CCP, Israel, for the fact that literally a handful of random credential-havers can evaporate every right we pretend to be entitled to, compel all of humanity to do so and so. But that's the way it is. Trivially-achievable credentials have that much sway.
They are in the pay of big pharma, whether in dollars directly deposited or in the promise of such. Actually more whores than anything else.
I suppose what I am trying to articulate, poorly, is a strong belief on my part that the extraordinary power of the FDA regarding vaccines (experimenting on all of humanity all the time) is so irrational that no industry can really exploit or exacerbate it. Industries only keep making vaccines because of NCVIA immunity. But you look at the budget that went to vaccines on the schedule, it's clear these things aren't being heavily invested in. And you have self-dealing. The eIPV which only had a few 100 kids in the trials and was self-approved by Albrecht and Modlin is a prime example.
This decision subscribed every American child of this century to 3x a Institut Mérieux / Sanofi product - why didn't Pfizer or any other American pharma industry step in to keep the money from going to a French competitor? It's better explained as Albrecht and Modlin being given essentially godlike powers to self-deal simply because nobody was paying attention.
And this is how the whole schedule is built. It's why there's no consistency in trial structure, understanding of correlates of protection, anything. In the Plotkin deposition the whole time it's like, "Well yes I get 100,000s to consult on vaccines, I'm the only person who knows more than one thing about them, and no one on Earth cares about this obviously ridiculous setup except this random dad, don't ask me to explain why." https://youtu.be/DFTsd042M3o?si=sRB-P2-A-Ed6WceW
I disagree with the idea that free speech gave us lockdowns. Any total lockdown i.e. closure of "non-essential" businesses, curfews or restricted hours, restricted occupancy, etc. can ONLY come from the use of force and legal coercion, which is the total purview of The State. Sure, some speech might convince some people and businesses from voluntarily locking down or staying home, but that itself has limits without the power of government. And I bet without that monopoly of force, people who initially might have been convinced of locking down would eventually and then completely let up. It is also the total control of the State that gave us vaccine mandates, forcefully for airlines and certain sectors, and corrosively for civil society by CDC/FDA guidelines.
Let me give you an example in the environment of the same overwhelming media speech and the believers of the public of "lockdown" of the difference when you have force vs no force: During the early days, spring to summer 2020, with real closures, restricted businesses from force they had no choice but to comply. However the call to "stay off the roads" had no force behind it. Obviously there was no way the government even properly define what that would entail even if they wanted to pass legislation, much less practically enforce it (e.g. how is driving to get groceries different from driving to go to the beach in terms of the act of driving itself?). Personally I found it an absolute joy to drive during that short time. And it was during this time that these misfits ignored the stay-at-home public speech without State force and broke the Cannonball record:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOWn1WSYhVQ
- money quote: "All of the Karens had stayed home"
Regarding lay censorship, as implied from above, ultimately it comes down to force and coercion, which in a free society derives from property rights (which itself derives from self ownership) Yes, different mediums and platforms and different people will censor but again like I discussed above, without total force or legal penalties or criminalization, that has very obvious limits and there will always be holes-- routes of free escape that the disaffected will choose, whatever your persuasion in civil society. You will see voluntary, recursive bifurcation of various sectors and functions of civil society when given the choice under increasing restrictions under any direction. Just witness the rise of Alt Media and alternative platforms and decentralized systems for those more technologically savvy.
In the last two weeks before lockdowns in San Francisco, every restaurant and gym was at quarter capacity (I went to restaurants and gyms every day, trying from the start to get natural immunity, which in light of B.1 and Delta being more severe was a good strategy; I don't know if I ever got infected before Omicron). Later Tinhorn Flats in Burbank was annihilated by the state - but when did any citizens show up to patronize it in defiance? Yes, the Western state's police are too afraid of the judiciary to not enforce draconian laws, that is real. But if we collectively disagree with the law and raise a stink then police enforcement melts away, as in the Floyd protests. Likewise, vaccine mandates followed widespread uptake. It's difficult to argue that the mule is pulling the cart when the cart always reached finish first.
I agree that the certain cases enforcement in the face of defiance depends on many factors of the local environment. In Australia and parts of Europe, people who've had enough of the more stricter lockdowns pushed back, in more defiant ways and yet, the government and police still had the will to ratchet up their force to shut them down. On the other hand, the Floyd riots showed the clear distinction between red vs blue cities (with an interesting exception in SoCal where even with some small conflicts, the response was much more muted), in racial perception, political correctness, and IMO with Trump in office. The irony is that people were not allowed to defend themselves against the mob in many cases, Floyd riots or not and police will go after those who try to do so. During this time only other minority groups were allowed to do so in fiery Chicago with a clear demarcation between blacks vs hispanics defending their shops and neighborhoods in certain areas (which reminded me of what happened with korean immigrants in los angeles during the rodney king riots when the police completely abandoned the area). Sadly this is not the case in San Francisco. I remember a case where an Asian shopkeeper was arrested for shooting a warning shot at thieves .Outside of truly peaceful protests on public property, really all of this just boils down to property rights, and violations thereof. Police just like The Science, are heavily politicized in reality. Coming back to vaccine mandates after higher uptake in blue localities e.g. vaccinationi cards or test status at businesses, certain events; well that again circles back to the same point on property rights if larger collective has the right to force others. (Similarly if we didn't have government policy dictating education, or public schools for that matter, at least part of the current culture war issue in the classroom would be moot)
Regarding treatment, I don’t think speech was helpful. Almost everyone made their mind up on the vaccines before criticism began. If someone had spoken up early, maybe - oh wait, Fauci did. Harris did. But all of this simply was evaporated from the media landscape by December and so there was no one speaking out where and when it counted.
Protests were punished for violating lockdowns, yes; until they weren’t. The difference was media support. They have always called tue shots in “peaceful protests,” it’s Lucy Football for just getting the government to understand what the media wants.
You could say, well imagine an alternate where a government in 2020 actually says “criticism of NPIs will be punished with jail until X” And as long as X extended the real date of NPIs ending, clearly speech suppression worsened things. But it’s hard to imagine the X exceeding the real date for blue states (~May 2022).
Still laughing at the 'shortage of economically attractive men'....when we can't even define a man or a woman...
What I took from that, is that toxic femininity has sucked the blood out of men and tossed their shriveled husks aside. Be interesting to see who's next for dinner.
Then, were they men, really?
And, are they really women?