You’re citing the national review and GG in advancing a goal of no mask mandates and no vaccine mandates. Awesome.
We actually have real time data about what happens with no mandates. It’s called most repub states. Take MS for example - 1 in 312 Mississippians is dead of Covid. Or Alabama - more people died in Alabama last year than were born. Maybe Florida is the way to go. Is it classist that the hardest hit areas are in the poorest areas of the north and panhandle? How bout them cowboys?! 43 Texas school districts closed due to Covid last week. No masks allowed though.
Well over a hundred thousand children have lost their primary caregiver to Covid. Tens of thousands are completely orphaned. Get those kids some bootstraps so they can practice a little self reliance.
Remember everybody! You wear a mask for me. And I wear a mask for you. That’s community.
If the Devil himself said the sky is blue, that would not suddenly make the sky red. It's intellectually dishonest and lazy to dismiss an argument based on nothing more than the lips it comes out of.
You can quote statistics as much as you want out of context to try and sound good: here's some that might be less convenient for you. 10% of all COVID cases AND deaths come from California, a state that has been very aggressive regarding lockdowns, mask mandates, and (I suspect) future vaccine mandates despite all of these things allegedly being a set of "silver bullets" that will solve the issue. California is also in the top 25% of states in terms of vaccination compliance- ironically enough, just over Florida.
So, if California does everything right and still remains a hotspot for COVID despite that, what do we need to do now? More lockdowns (which didn't solve the issue)? Extend the mask mandates to private meetings and offer monetary rewards for informing on your neighbor's dangerous unmasked barbeque? Banish the vaccine-non-compliant to the ghettos, where their dangerous antisocial distrust of the government won't contaminate our pure society?
A few things. First off, I am not advocating against getting the vaccine and repeatedly say "get the damn vaccine" and I haven't yet spotted any of my readers arguing against it, either. As far as I can tell most people here are vaccinated or would like to be.
Second, people in blue states are getting vaccinated at higher rates voluntarily NOT because of mandates. People are getting vaccinated at lower rates in red states for the same reason. I very much doubt a mandate would even be effective other than at riling up anti-vaccine sentiment and protests and, dare I say, politicians with strong and loyal followings. The carrot is mightier than the stick sometimes. Most times, I'd wager.
Third, a HUGE chunk of the deaths and cases you're referencing were pre-vaccine.
Fourth, Texas schools shouldn't be shutting down due to COVID they should be testing and going about their business. Sick kids should quarantine for two weeks, test, etc. The risk of actual serious illness in these schools is almost nil. Many other types of illness are as threatening or more so to kids. Plenty of schools with mask mandates in place are also shutting down because masks only do so much and the science shows that it's the time spent indoors exposed to the virus, not masks or social distancing, that makes the biggest difference.
As for the poorest being hit hardest, yeah that's pretty shitty. Poor people and POC are also more likely to avoid getting vaccinated. We should do our best to make vaccines available to them and to educate them about the importance of vaccination if at all possible.
I have no interest in haranguing you. I’ll say your point number 3 isn’t accurate. For the coastal states / Dem states you’re right that most deaths came before the vaccines. But southern and repub states in general are getting hammered right now and are seeing record deaths right now.
And one thing about schools - teachers, aids monitors, bus drivers - are all quitting in droves. They feel unsafe and overworked. Killing and sickening more of them thru criminally inept health measures has a way of doing that. My kids district in CT has 10k students. I get notified daily of infections. They average about 5. The districts that are closing are getting dozens and they have the kids packed in with no masks. We wear masks.
I am fully vaccinated and strongly advocate vaccination to literally every unvaccinated person I talk to. Being unable to see shades of grey in life is very unhealthy.
I would like to reason with YOU, but you seem very aggressively opposed to the idea that someone could disagree with you for any reason besides malice or mental frailty.
That’s a great way of putting it. That’s exactly how I feel when discussing Covid. The science, despite Eriks protestations to the contrary, is clear. Get vaxxed and stay masked. I wear my mask for you, you wear your mask for me. For how long? I don’t know. I tell you this. I’m out and about every day. Restaurants. Concerts. Boy Scouts. I play basketball. Why? Because in my state and in my town most people are vaxxed. It’s like 80 something percent in my area. And we wear masks. I don’t want to. But it’s the least I can do to protect my community.
But you make a fair point: California's success recently compared to Florida DOES mostly have to do with a high rate of vaccination- voluntary vaccination undertaken by an informed populace. Of course, involuntary vaccination by an uninformed and resentful populace would in theory produce identical results in terms of combatting COVID, but the question you should be asking is: is that a price I am willing to pay? How much power do you trust the government with? Not the current government, mind: if you're a Democrat, I want you to think about what the next Republican government would do with the power you willingly gave to be handed down to them.
There is a famous quote from A Man For All Seasons about how, if you cut down every law to catch the Devil, you leave yourself nowhere to hide when he turns around on you. I think most people's attitude of "I don't care what the government does, just make the pandemic go away" boils down to taking a chainsaw to the law to catch the Devil.
The masked "servants" and unmasked "elites" is looking a lot like The Hunger Games. This power grab is so over the top, I don't see how it can sustain itself for very long...but I thought rap was a fad, so what do I know.
I'd be happy with a two-fold societal revelation: On the one hand, self-reliance and taking care of ourselves and our own; on the other hand, a return to that sense of 'we're all in this together so let's pitch in how we can' that defined WW2 America. Mandates are anti-community and anti-individual and ultimately that kind of power is built on a house of cards.
I don't know if I entirely agree on your take regarding mandates- I think things like mask mandates are useful for an emergency. The problem is that a growing faction of people are crying out for emergency, last-ditch measures to be made normal parts of government operation.
The risk to children is obviously lower than other groups. However:
- ICUs are starting to fill up in some states (children are the largest unvaccinated group)
- It's easier for Europe to allow unmasked children because AFAIK in many of the countries a) they don't have a huge amount of adults who are vaccine holdouts and b) they have invested in free/cheap rapid at home tests, so parents can keep their kids at home: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/briefing/rapid-testing-covid-us.html
- We don't fully know the extent of what long-haul COVID could mean for children or how often they can get it
My 5-year old is currently masked at school, and while it's not ideal, it adds a small amount of protection until the vaccine is approved within the next couple of months.
Once vaccine is approved for all groups, I do agree that we need an "endgame" for COVID where it is treated partially like the flu (we'll likely need yearly, variant-specific shots & it will kill a certain # of people per year) and partially like measles/polio (govt-funded institutions, schools, etc) should require vaccinations or constant negative tests. And yes, the masks should then be totally optional on a per-person basis.
I like the idea of an endgame a lot. I just don't trust that the powers will be will ever set one up. Maybe it'll just happen ad hoc which is fine, but my feeling right now is that we're going to keep getting fed new reasons to not return to normal simply because this drives the news cycle and gives politicians an ongoing crisis to take advantage of (on both sides, I should add, much like abortion has been a driving force on the left and the right for so long now).
But I don't agree that this should be considered analogous to abortion. There's no reason Democrats specifically would want to have COVID restrictions in place in perpetuity. Whether you favor them or not, they make people miserable, and potentially hamper economic growth. Ds want this to be over so they have a chance of not getting slaughtered in the next election cycle. The reason mandates are being pushed now is because it seems to them like the only way out of this.
That's a good point (though I think Republicans don't really want abortion to go away either since it's good for their political agenda). I do think mandates have a pretty big chance of backfiring, however.
For the people who want to have COVID restrictions in place essentially ad infinatum ("until there are zero COVID cases in the US" increasingly boils down to this), there are two camps from what I've seen:
1. The people who seem to have been stuck in fight-or-flight mode since the pandemic began, who are no longer thinking rationally and just want the big scary problem to go away. You saw a similar reaction after 9/11, where a large subset of the populace wrote the government a blank check to trample over constitutional rights and due process in the name of making them feel safe. The truth these people need to realize is that only they are capable of making themselves feel safe- the government has yet to develop the power to beam the sensation of safety into people's brains, and if you're suddenly hypervigilant about an invisible threat, your brain isn't going to ratchet down just because the government's done something. These are the supporters/dupes of the second group.
2. The elements in the political process who want more power. Some of these people are idealists who believe that once they've seized enough power they can magically solve all the problems in the world, while others are the kind of human-like creature that would respond to any earnest question of WHY they need all this power with a confused look. Some people are possessed with an inherent lust for power over the lives of others for its own sake, who get a thrill out of forcing others to jump through arbitrary hoops for no other reason than because they can compel this behavior from those they hold power over. This tyrannical type of personality is naturally drawn to any position of power, including the government, and is the primary reason why I have a healthy distrust of the same.
Thank you so much for posting this - I follow you for your walking dead posts, but it's great to see this opinion finally expressed. I live in a wealthy NJ town and feel like the only objecting to their 2 and 4yo kids spending 30hrs a week effectively muzzled. I think that two major factors are economic and legal: economically, it costs more to test, so the government advocates the cheaper option and gets to seem like it cares. Legally, places are terrified of being sued for allowing infection, so it's in their interest to be as cautious as possible. Human and children's rights don't stand a chance against such arguments.
Yeah, good point about the economic and legal factors here. I don't think it would be easy to sue but then again I'm always surprised when it comes to lawsuits. And yeah, testing is hard and masks are easy.
Neither they use here in Argentina. We are not the wisest nation, neither i like the current goverment, but so far it doesn't seem schools have been a big factor on the spread of the virus. Teachers, fathers and older kids use masks.
I would seriously question anyone who thinks coverage of Covid-19 is hysteria if they’re not actually “in the shit,” as they say. If ICUs and hospitals are full of Covid patients then it’s because they need to be there medically. It’s a scary situation to have an ICU full of patients with one illness as opposed to a bunch of people with differing illnesses and ailments which is what used to happen.
It’s hysteria up until the point that you’re put on a ventilator - then it’s truly a crisis. That’s what I’ve seen.
Plural of anecdote isn't data, but: I live in an area that's both tourist-heavy (in the summer) and has a comparatively low rate of vaccine compliance. The tsunami of COVID cases that doomsayers said was going to overwhelm our hospitals and cause grandma to die rotting at home because the EMTs couldn't save her never manifested this summer. I know this because I know people who work as EMTs. It seems to me commonsense measures (masking in crowded public spaces, heavily encouraging people to stay home if they have COVID symptoms and offering compensation for them, and generally making the sort of decisions you would make in a bad flu season) are just as effective, if not MORE so, than extreme overreactions- with the added benefit that they don't erode community trust in their leaders as they see a power-grab behind unnecessary lockdowns.
I think the picture of AOC has more to do with irrational hate than mask mandates and or classism. Any restaurant (or place where the guests would be eating and drinking) does not require the guests to wear masks but the servers do because presumably, they are not eating and drinking. Now it may be classist to have any person, even someone designated as a 'server' bring food and drink to another person, even if that person is a guest in an establishment but that's a debate for another time (with someone a little less 'angry-as-a resting-state').
You’re citing the national review and GG in advancing a goal of no mask mandates and no vaccine mandates. Awesome.
We actually have real time data about what happens with no mandates. It’s called most repub states. Take MS for example - 1 in 312 Mississippians is dead of Covid. Or Alabama - more people died in Alabama last year than were born. Maybe Florida is the way to go. Is it classist that the hardest hit areas are in the poorest areas of the north and panhandle? How bout them cowboys?! 43 Texas school districts closed due to Covid last week. No masks allowed though.
Well over a hundred thousand children have lost their primary caregiver to Covid. Tens of thousands are completely orphaned. Get those kids some bootstraps so they can practice a little self reliance.
Remember everybody! You wear a mask for me. And I wear a mask for you. That’s community.
If the Devil himself said the sky is blue, that would not suddenly make the sky red. It's intellectually dishonest and lazy to dismiss an argument based on nothing more than the lips it comes out of.
You can quote statistics as much as you want out of context to try and sound good: here's some that might be less convenient for you. 10% of all COVID cases AND deaths come from California, a state that has been very aggressive regarding lockdowns, mask mandates, and (I suspect) future vaccine mandates despite all of these things allegedly being a set of "silver bullets" that will solve the issue. California is also in the top 25% of states in terms of vaccination compliance- ironically enough, just over Florida.
So, if California does everything right and still remains a hotspot for COVID despite that, what do we need to do now? More lockdowns (which didn't solve the issue)? Extend the mask mandates to private meetings and offer monetary rewards for informing on your neighbor's dangerous unmasked barbeque? Banish the vaccine-non-compliant to the ghettos, where their dangerous antisocial distrust of the government won't contaminate our pure society?
Awesome!
12.5% of the country lives in CA. CA got hammered early in the pandemic before we vaccines and all the knowledge we have now.
Erik! The anti-vaxxers are here and they like your message. Good luck, man.
I'll just add that if the anti-vaxxers *do* like my message, that's wonderful. After all, I am telling them to get vaccinated. Maybe they'll listen.
A few things. First off, I am not advocating against getting the vaccine and repeatedly say "get the damn vaccine" and I haven't yet spotted any of my readers arguing against it, either. As far as I can tell most people here are vaccinated or would like to be.
Second, people in blue states are getting vaccinated at higher rates voluntarily NOT because of mandates. People are getting vaccinated at lower rates in red states for the same reason. I very much doubt a mandate would even be effective other than at riling up anti-vaccine sentiment and protests and, dare I say, politicians with strong and loyal followings. The carrot is mightier than the stick sometimes. Most times, I'd wager.
Third, a HUGE chunk of the deaths and cases you're referencing were pre-vaccine.
Fourth, Texas schools shouldn't be shutting down due to COVID they should be testing and going about their business. Sick kids should quarantine for two weeks, test, etc. The risk of actual serious illness in these schools is almost nil. Many other types of illness are as threatening or more so to kids. Plenty of schools with mask mandates in place are also shutting down because masks only do so much and the science shows that it's the time spent indoors exposed to the virus, not masks or social distancing, that makes the biggest difference.
As for the poorest being hit hardest, yeah that's pretty shitty. Poor people and POC are also more likely to avoid getting vaccinated. We should do our best to make vaccines available to them and to educate them about the importance of vaccination if at all possible.
I have no interest in haranguing you. I’ll say your point number 3 isn’t accurate. For the coastal states / Dem states you’re right that most deaths came before the vaccines. But southern and repub states in general are getting hammered right now and are seeing record deaths right now.
And one thing about schools - teachers, aids monitors, bus drivers - are all quitting in droves. They feel unsafe and overworked. Killing and sickening more of them thru criminally inept health measures has a way of doing that. My kids district in CT has 10k students. I get notified daily of infections. They average about 5. The districts that are closing are getting dozens and they have the kids packed in with no masks. We wear masks.
I am fully vaccinated and strongly advocate vaccination to literally every unvaccinated person I talk to. Being unable to see shades of grey in life is very unhealthy.
That’s awesome. You want to reason with a virus. Good luck!
I would like to reason with YOU, but you seem very aggressively opposed to the idea that someone could disagree with you for any reason besides malice or mental frailty.
That’s a great way of putting it. That’s exactly how I feel when discussing Covid. The science, despite Eriks protestations to the contrary, is clear. Get vaxxed and stay masked. I wear my mask for you, you wear your mask for me. For how long? I don’t know. I tell you this. I’m out and about every day. Restaurants. Concerts. Boy Scouts. I play basketball. Why? Because in my state and in my town most people are vaxxed. It’s like 80 something percent in my area. And we wear masks. I don’t want to. But it’s the least I can do to protect my community.
But you make a fair point: California's success recently compared to Florida DOES mostly have to do with a high rate of vaccination- voluntary vaccination undertaken by an informed populace. Of course, involuntary vaccination by an uninformed and resentful populace would in theory produce identical results in terms of combatting COVID, but the question you should be asking is: is that a price I am willing to pay? How much power do you trust the government with? Not the current government, mind: if you're a Democrat, I want you to think about what the next Republican government would do with the power you willingly gave to be handed down to them.
There is a famous quote from A Man For All Seasons about how, if you cut down every law to catch the Devil, you leave yourself nowhere to hide when he turns around on you. I think most people's attitude of "I don't care what the government does, just make the pandemic go away" boils down to taking a chainsaw to the law to catch the Devil.
The masked "servants" and unmasked "elites" is looking a lot like The Hunger Games. This power grab is so over the top, I don't see how it can sustain itself for very long...but I thought rap was a fad, so what do I know.
I cannot think of any other public emergency that has been characterized by so much misinformation, disinformation, and outright deception.
The behavior of our glorious "leaders" has for the most part been despicable.
The long term consequences are unknowable, but the erosion of public trust is material.
One of the benefits of this public policy failure is the recognition that the individual is responsible for his own well-being.
In the end, if we relearn self reliance, we all benefit.
I'd be happy with a two-fold societal revelation: On the one hand, self-reliance and taking care of ourselves and our own; on the other hand, a return to that sense of 'we're all in this together so let's pitch in how we can' that defined WW2 America. Mandates are anti-community and anti-individual and ultimately that kind of power is built on a house of cards.
I don't know if I entirely agree on your take regarding mandates- I think things like mask mandates are useful for an emergency. The problem is that a growing faction of people are crying out for emergency, last-ditch measures to be made normal parts of government operation.
The risk to children is obviously lower than other groups. However:
- ICUs are starting to fill up in some states (children are the largest unvaccinated group)
- It's easier for Europe to allow unmasked children because AFAIK in many of the countries a) they don't have a huge amount of adults who are vaccine holdouts and b) they have invested in free/cheap rapid at home tests, so parents can keep their kids at home: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/briefing/rapid-testing-covid-us.html
- We don't fully know the extent of what long-haul COVID could mean for children or how often they can get it
My 5-year old is currently masked at school, and while it's not ideal, it adds a small amount of protection until the vaccine is approved within the next couple of months.
Once vaccine is approved for all groups, I do agree that we need an "endgame" for COVID where it is treated partially like the flu (we'll likely need yearly, variant-specific shots & it will kill a certain # of people per year) and partially like measles/polio (govt-funded institutions, schools, etc) should require vaccinations or constant negative tests. And yes, the masks should then be totally optional on a per-person basis.
I like the idea of an endgame a lot. I just don't trust that the powers will be will ever set one up. Maybe it'll just happen ad hoc which is fine, but my feeling right now is that we're going to keep getting fed new reasons to not return to normal simply because this drives the news cycle and gives politicians an ongoing crisis to take advantage of (on both sides, I should add, much like abortion has been a driving force on the left and the right for so long now).
Drives the news cycle - sure.
But I don't agree that this should be considered analogous to abortion. There's no reason Democrats specifically would want to have COVID restrictions in place in perpetuity. Whether you favor them or not, they make people miserable, and potentially hamper economic growth. Ds want this to be over so they have a chance of not getting slaughtered in the next election cycle. The reason mandates are being pushed now is because it seems to them like the only way out of this.
That's a good point (though I think Republicans don't really want abortion to go away either since it's good for their political agenda). I do think mandates have a pretty big chance of backfiring, however.
For the people who want to have COVID restrictions in place essentially ad infinatum ("until there are zero COVID cases in the US" increasingly boils down to this), there are two camps from what I've seen:
1. The people who seem to have been stuck in fight-or-flight mode since the pandemic began, who are no longer thinking rationally and just want the big scary problem to go away. You saw a similar reaction after 9/11, where a large subset of the populace wrote the government a blank check to trample over constitutional rights and due process in the name of making them feel safe. The truth these people need to realize is that only they are capable of making themselves feel safe- the government has yet to develop the power to beam the sensation of safety into people's brains, and if you're suddenly hypervigilant about an invisible threat, your brain isn't going to ratchet down just because the government's done something. These are the supporters/dupes of the second group.
2. The elements in the political process who want more power. Some of these people are idealists who believe that once they've seized enough power they can magically solve all the problems in the world, while others are the kind of human-like creature that would respond to any earnest question of WHY they need all this power with a confused look. Some people are possessed with an inherent lust for power over the lives of others for its own sake, who get a thrill out of forcing others to jump through arbitrary hoops for no other reason than because they can compel this behavior from those they hold power over. This tyrannical type of personality is naturally drawn to any position of power, including the government, and is the primary reason why I have a healthy distrust of the same.
Should say "parents can keep their *potentially COVID-contagious* kids at home" (no edit function, Substack?)
Thank you so much for posting this - I follow you for your walking dead posts, but it's great to see this opinion finally expressed. I live in a wealthy NJ town and feel like the only objecting to their 2 and 4yo kids spending 30hrs a week effectively muzzled. I think that two major factors are economic and legal: economically, it costs more to test, so the government advocates the cheaper option and gets to seem like it cares. Legally, places are terrified of being sued for allowing infection, so it's in their interest to be as cautious as possible. Human and children's rights don't stand a chance against such arguments.
Yeah, good point about the economic and legal factors here. I don't think it would be easy to sue but then again I'm always surprised when it comes to lawsuits. And yeah, testing is hard and masks are easy.
Neither they use here in Argentina. We are not the wisest nation, neither i like the current goverment, but so far it doesn't seem schools have been a big factor on the spread of the virus. Teachers, fathers and older kids use masks.
I would seriously question anyone who thinks coverage of Covid-19 is hysteria if they’re not actually “in the shit,” as they say. If ICUs and hospitals are full of Covid patients then it’s because they need to be there medically. It’s a scary situation to have an ICU full of patients with one illness as opposed to a bunch of people with differing illnesses and ailments which is what used to happen.
It’s hysteria up until the point that you’re put on a ventilator - then it’s truly a crisis. That’s what I’ve seen.
Plural of anecdote isn't data, but: I live in an area that's both tourist-heavy (in the summer) and has a comparatively low rate of vaccine compliance. The tsunami of COVID cases that doomsayers said was going to overwhelm our hospitals and cause grandma to die rotting at home because the EMTs couldn't save her never manifested this summer. I know this because I know people who work as EMTs. It seems to me commonsense measures (masking in crowded public spaces, heavily encouraging people to stay home if they have COVID symptoms and offering compensation for them, and generally making the sort of decisions you would make in a bad flu season) are just as effective, if not MORE so, than extreme overreactions- with the added benefit that they don't erode community trust in their leaders as they see a power-grab behind unnecessary lockdowns.
I think the picture of AOC has more to do with irrational hate than mask mandates and or classism. Any restaurant (or place where the guests would be eating and drinking) does not require the guests to wear masks but the servers do because presumably, they are not eating and drinking. Now it may be classist to have any person, even someone designated as a 'server' bring food and drink to another person, even if that person is a guest in an establishment but that's a debate for another time (with someone a little less 'angry-as-a resting-state').