I think what makes it hard is the fact that we’re doing this to ourselves.
If it were some natural event like a (real) plague or a meteor hitting the earth and making it impossible for humans to live, somehow in my mind such an event would be easier to deal with?
“Well, that’s an indifferent universe for ya.”
The fact that we’re doing this to ourselves, and we could choose not to, but we’re not choosing not to, is actually driving me crazy.
So there's COVID, the youth transgender stuff, the p-hacking/replication crises, and then the humanities-are-weird now that deBoer has written about (see: Writing Studies, the Field that Hates Itself). I'm sure we're only a few years away from someone generating this sort of academic writing with an AI.
I wonder what the long-run equilibrium on all this is. I think universities will see some cuts going forward. We will also probably put more faith in people with hard math and science backgrounds.
I think it was profoundly fucked up for experts to try to mix their normative politics with their descriptive science. It just makes me take them less seriously on both.
Long run, the universities will hemorrhage credibility and, therefore, prestige. They'll then start to fail economically. An expensive degree is much less useful as a social signalling device when it no longer communicates intellectual acumen, but rather the opposite. This is already happening, with many employers actively preferring not to hire university graduates, and many youth weighing the cost against the benefit of a university education and finding the comparison unfavorable.
The universities are in the toilet, no doubt. People, even our elite, seem unable to evaluate what’s true or likely, and the universities are just indoctrination centers. When my oldest went to college, I didn’t quite realize this, and I sent him off with giddy hope and excitement about how much he’d learn and how much his horizons and mind would be expanded. I just laugh at this naive notion now.
And while in theory I thought, well, maybe the new places like Ralston or UofAustin will make a difference and find a niche, I decided those seem to be conservative projects and have their own issues. Of course conservatives deserve a voice and you can see how thoroughly they’ve been shut out everywhere else. Of course they need a home. But we need a place for everyone to gather. Having two parallel educational tracks, left and right, just perpetuates the problems we already have.
Again, I’m not saying I have the answers. I actually just think we’re all fucked and heading for a quick extinction or perhaps just societal collapse and a new Dark Age.
Conservative universities aren't the answer; that's just a different kind of indoctrination center in the long run.
The solution won't be found in new universities. It will need to be something very different, much more fluid and open. We have this prejudice that scholarship and education must be coordinated in large institutes, but there's no particular reason that it couldn't operate more in the way of law firm partnerships or small gyms - scholars working alone or in small, independent groups. Ultimately the problem we face is one of overbearing managerial oversight, which has stripped liberty from the world in the name of safety and efficiency. That's not just true in universities, but everywhere. The answer is to look for ways of doing the opposite, and rendering the managerial class obsolete and surplus to requirements.
“ scholars working alone or in small, independent groups” is part of the problem— even at large universities, that’s what we have now: people who are so sub-sub-sub specialized that they have no idea what the guy down the hall does.
I agree with getting rid of bureaucracy, levels and levels of useless administrators— but I don’t yet see an alternative to universities that does what society needs them to do.
Ah, I need to be more specific there. Yes, hyper-specialization is a problem. I was referring more to income independence. In fact, if scholars became genuinely independent - that is, not reliant on the sufferance of an impersonal bureaucracy - I suspect the hyper-specialization problem would solve itself. Same way that a family doctor has to be a generalist.
I’m so glad you’re more optimistic than I am! Yes, I do see this as a problem that has existed forever, but I don’t see that in the past there was such potential for anyone with a master’s degree and a few thousand bucks to wipe out humankind. We didn’t have that knowledge, technology, or personal power in the past. I think these are dangerous times, and stupidity will end us. I hope I’m very wrong!
"And I can't blame these scientists. When your life could be on the line and potentially the well-being of family and friends, who wouldn't give in?"
I'm curious what you mean by this. Do you think their lives and the well-being of family and friends were threatened? If so, by whom? While I believe their current positions could have been in jeopardy, it's hard for me to believe the perceived danger extended any further than that.
Not to shed too much light on my private life, but part of my family used to hold positions where they were in contact with the officials of eastern Germany. It was the norm to be told what to say in specific scenarios, especially in crisis times or else you would lose your job and potentially get spied on even more or worse, be put into certain facilities. A mentally retarded relative, for e.g. was held in captivity for a long time in his life.
So I think I have some first-hand experience which makes me erase the "wow that's such a crazy conspiracy" picture.
Now about what you said. Certainly, what does the well-being of your family mean to you? Losing a specific source of income or job security? Physical pain?
Well, the "good" thing is that both happen regularly around the world and we have lots of knowledge about them.
Just to name something that is currently happening which even the German media picked up.
Russian oligarchs dying left and right, or Chinese billionaires disappearing. People not only in high ranking positions, but also simply with lots of influence, constantly get intimidated or pushed into a certain direction. Looking into countries with lots of corruption, it's easily visible there, but in the US this will certainly happen behind closed curtains.
For this specific case I will just say "Shi Zhengli", the head of the wuhan institute.
Who does it? Well, it could be anyone ranging from the government, to opposition or simple feuds over job positions.
But we know this, we've known this throughout history - it always gets written down years later, so it would be foolish to think this isn't happening.
That's why I said it's completely understandable and I would definitely do the same if someone approached me. There are certain things you can't go against without making life hell.
In Germany, we have police now scouring comments and if they tell you off you better do it or you pay a hefty sum or worse, you can even go to prison, so if the day comes I would even stop "critical" comments on the internet and then it's back to secret clubs and meetings underground ;)
There is so much interesting stuff in this comment, “in Germany, we have police now scouring comments and if they tell you off you better do it or you pay a hefty sum or worse, you can even go to prison.”
What sort of things do they object to? And what outcomes do they want? Do they want people to remove the comment? Edit it?
I’ve heard one or twice that Shi Zhengli “disappeared” but I had no way of verifying if it’s true or if it’s just crazy-talk.
Basically it's supposed to work against hate speech, but clearly that's not how it's used and you can see it daily in German youtube comment sections.
I wrote a comment about how you called certain people in Ukraine Nazis and that I don't agree with it etc.
I could basically file a complaint against you for diffamation, because of my differing views.
And the Nazis are a very delicate topic in Germany so it would be problematic.
What do we learn from this? Don't use clear names in German web, when you post opposing views :D
Well, there is so much talk about disappearances or weird police visits, including expats who lived there, that it seems likely to be true, especially under such circumstances.
How would you verify that it is true? The Chinese government would certainly not issue a press release if they had arrested her. There are alternatives between "it's been completely verified" and "it's crazy talk".
If I may offer some constructive criticism of the left in general, the “crazy talk, misinformation” label is trotted out far too quickly and easily. I thought your post was a good illustration of this.
“Crazy talk” should be reserved for extreme examples. Like alien abduction, JFK secretly survived, or Hillary runs a sex ring out of a pizza parlor.
Too many things that were deemed “crazy” have turned out to be true:
The CIA colluded with the Mafia to murder Castro.
Nixon really was involved in covering up a “third-rate burglary”.
Ulcers are in fact caused by a bacteria, not stress.
Hunter’s laptop is real, not “Russian disinformation”.
“Russian collusion”, on the other hand, was not.
I think we would all benefit if accusations of “misinformation” and “crazy talk” were scaled back tremendously. People have different perspectives; accusing them of being crazy does not advance the conversation. Better to ask “why do you think that?” and listen to the answer.
Thank you for the informative response, although it makes it harder for me to share your optimism.
We Americans know that such things go on, but our mantra has always been "it can't happen here". And that is protection for the perpetrators- Americans will refuse to believe it is happening. The "conspiracy theorist" label will be vigorously applied to any who try to point out that it might be happening. If that doesn't do the trick to shut them up, then ...? Like you, I don't think this was a benign instance of scientists lying to themselves.
This was a thought-provoking and sobering article. I initially dismissed the lab-leak theory out of hand because 1. I had read something somewhere that the changes from SARS to Covid-19 looked like other viral evolutions that happen naturally, and 2. Because my online friends who were promoting the lab-leak hypothesis were politically on the right and had shown bias against China in the past. I am embarrassed to say that I was unbecomingly dismissive of their arguments.
I think we still can’t say how Covid and our current version of monkeypox came to be, but it is worrisome that there still seems to be a taboo on discussing gain-of-function research and even more so on regular people saying, “Is this kind of research really worth the risk?! Why are we doing it?!”
I hadn’t even thought of this point before: “People who were pushing the natural origin had their entire careers at stake. If gain-of-function research stops, their funding stops. Their entire careers stop. So…they had every reason to lie to themselves that the origin wasn’t all that important, anyway.” Researchers wouldn’t need to be openly self-interested in refusing to look at information supporting the lab-leak theory; just a slight bias against the conclusion that gain-of-function research is dangerous would be enough to cause motivated reasoning, and also the taboo on discussing the lab-leak theory.
Yes— I really think most people are basically good, and yet we are all unconsciously tempted to lie to ourselves when the benefit swings one way or another.
I think at this point, looking at GoF as anything other than very risky bioweapons research is very difficult indeed. None of the stories about “it will help us develop treatments and vaccines” seems remotely plausible. They can’t point to one treatment, one breakthrough, one vaccine. All they have to show for it is dangerous pathogens.
And even if the folks doing the research are looking at it as some kind of deterrent (“We need the worst viruses, because if we don’t create them, the other guys will”) it’s clear that compared to, say, nuclear weapons, accidents are much more likely, and the outcome is impossible to contain. SARS-2 didn’t stay in China. It went everywhere. Viruses are crappy weapons.
This stuff could really end us. At the very least, it will continue to cause needless human suffering, and it’s driving me crazy to think about how few people seem to be thinking about this or wanting to do something about it.
Even the (now apparently inactive) Cambridge Working Group is eerily quiet. Richard Ebright is rather sassy on Twitter, but that’s about it.
And then as you point out: the lab leak stuff was picked up by the anti-China fringe early on, which gave it very little credibility in everyone else’s eyes. When the fringes pick up an idea, lots of other wacky ideas seem to get attached to it, and that prevents people from taking it seriously.
In fact, sometimes I wonder whether our intelligence community handles stories it wants to bury by amplifying them in the lunatic fringes with a lot of added colorful details. Baby and bath water. No one’s gonna take a lab leak seriously when on the one hand the Lancet publishes a respectable letter with top scientists signing it, and on the other hand Q Anon is babbling incoherently and with bad spelling and grammar about the evil Chinese trying to kill us all, and by the way Fauci’s in on it.
But in the mainstream, among the scientists who should know better: Why is no one taking about these viruses and what a big problem this research is? Can’t Fauci even admit after 6.4 million people are dead that this research was a bad idea? He’s in the thick of it. He doesn’t seem like an evil guy. He’s like what, almost 80? He won’t be here much longer. Is he really worried about his job or reputation, more so than the fate of future generations?
It would be hard to admit that your entire career was hurtful rather than helpful. Who goes into a career thinking that an accidental lab leak could kill 6.4 million people (probably more, and it’s still going to be killing people after you’re dead)?
"Can’t Fauci even admit after 6.4 million people are dead that this research was a bad idea? He’s in the thick of it. He doesn’t seem like an evil guy. He’s like what, almost 80? He won’t be here much longer. Is he really worried about his job or reputation, more so than the fate of future generations?" It's not just his job and reputation. If the lab leak hypothesis is correct, the US is probably implicated as well due to the NIH funding the EcoHealth Alliance's work (archived from Vanity Fair: https://archive.ph/oiZTa). Other countries would probably clamor for the US and China to pay enormous sums in restitution, with good reason. This may be overly conspiratorial, but I wouldn't be surprised if Fauci is being pressured by intelligence to prevent the truth from coming to light, assuming the lab leak hypothesis is true.
Also possible. Yes. Restitution or not (and it’s merited) any decent person should still advocate for shutting down this research. They could even take the playing-dumb tactic of “oops I guess we’ll never know” (even though that’s not true) and say “better safe than sorry; let’s shut down this research just in case.”
I understand your point about the Lancet, but didn't the idea that the virus leaked from Wuhan seem like a possibility to be considered? Didn't it seem odd that there was near-hysteria at the thought that anyone could take it seriously? Why the zeal to paint it as xenophobic? Where were our critical thinking skills? Buried under contempt for the rubes who could doubt The Lancet.
And is it really likely that the scientists who choose a career in virology do not at least contemplate the possibility that a lab leak could kill millions of people?
I think anyone who read the Lancet and Nature articles with a critical eye thought something was weird about those, and shortly after that, it was more widely understood that a lab that studied bat coronaviruses was right there in Wuhan. IIRC I wasn’t aware of that fact until April when I saw Yuri Deigin’s Medium article (most of which still impressively holds up years later, even though this wasn’t his specific area and he was dealing with very partial sets of facts).
So yes, a few people considered it, and eventually the weight of the evidence was there for anyone to see (the book helped a lot, some of the long form articles helped a lot), but for the typical smart person who has other interests and their own career to worry about and who doesn’t read about this stuff as a hobby (or second full-time job), it would have seemed kind of loony-tunes, I think, for many months. And eventually the zoonosis story took on the patina of “established fact— we’ve known this for ages!” so that even smart critical thinkers might still not want to revisit that lab leak possibility. Then you have to consider what all one’s friends and family believe. If the received wisdom in your circles is that it came from a bat, and you know previous outbreaks came from nature, and you’re not a science fanatic, why would you think too much more about it?
It makes sense to me on the level of human psychology and how all our minds work.
And whether scientists thought a lab leak would kills millions of people, I think they all believe “it won’t happen to us because we’re really careful.” Unrealistic optimism is a real thing!
I guess my mind just works differently. To me, Common Sense 101, combined with the massive implications of a lab leak (as you have eloquently outlined in your post) should have demanded a thorough investigation of the lab standing in the epicenter of the outbreak. Which just coincidentally was researching bat coronaviruses.
But all the smart people were too busy denouncing the crazy right wingers and screaming about dangerous misinformation.
Right, but having seen this happen to “your” side, does it make you wonder whether it’s ever happening in reverse? Does it make you wonder whether the propaganda runs both ways?
For example, I’ve seen stuff about the anti-racist teaching in schools where people on the right say that the people on the left are trying to make white kids hate themselves.
So, I can think the anti-racist teaching in schools is really dumb and counterproductive and actually promotes racial division and decreases people’s likelihood of trying to befriend people from other races -- all bad stuff-- without thinking that the left’s actual project is to cause anyone to hate themselves.
China and Fauci weren’t trying to kill people en masse, just as the loony faux left isn’t trying to make children hate themselves.
But once we cast “those people over there” as the mustache-twirling bad guys, we decrease the likelihood of engaging with them productively. Why would you engage productively with a monster?
It was easier to see the lab leak as common sense if the people you hang out with were also considering it. And it was harder to see the lab leak as common sense if the people you hung out with thought it was crazy-talk and came from “bad people.”
If “your side” already holds the correct-ish view, it’s easier to say “Just common sense!”
Of course I recognize that the propaganda and fear mongering happen on both sides, and both sides seem hell -bent on promoting their version of group think. But I don't find it understandable and excusable when people eagerly indulge in it and proclaim it a virtue.
I also recognize that the left is not trying to make children hate themselves, and that Fauci was not trying to kill people. But I believe results matter, not simply the lack of bad intent. As I taught my son many years ago, maybe you didn't mean to spill the milk, but the milk is still on the floor. At some point we know as parents that you have to take the cup of milk away from the person who keeps "accidentally" dumping it on the floor.
I guess I'm just a simplistic thinker but I think Pink Floyd summed it up. " Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone".
'Politically on the right' is now simply code for 'opposes the current power structure'. Since the powerful are proven liars, it follows that only the opposition will be at least potentially truthful. Those who continue to react allergically and mindlessly to accusations that a given voice is a 'right-winger' will continue falling for the propaganda, and continue wondering why events always take them by surprise.
I do think anyone who is paying attention to how our country has been run (for some time, in the interests of business and the ruling elite) believes they oppose the current power structure. Right or left, they believe this.
The loony faux left believes the problem is with “rights” and “oppression” and can be solved with things like DEI. (The real left, of which there are very few remaining, believe the problem can be solved by addressing economic issues.)
I’m not sure what the _loony_ right believes, since I travel more in left circles (although I’ve seen a lot of weird anti-vax and Q anon posts over the years, enough to maybe get a glimmer of what the fringe-right might believe?) but I do know when Trump was running for president, many of my very decent and kind conservative friends believed he indeed was going to “drain the swamp” and shake things up, ie, oppose the current power structure--when in fact, while he was definitely an outsider to politics and to the brand of fake-smooth political speech that was once considered prerequisite to success, he didn’t drain the swamp at all. He enriched the swamp.
Many decent people on the right just want decent opportunities for everyone and to be left alone. They don’t want to worry about announcing their pronouns, they don’t want every interaction to be a gotcha-minefield of CorrectSpeak, and they want the loony left to shut up. That’s a lot of common ground between my friends on the right and me.
So..: I think anyone, left or right, who sees the mess we’re in wants to oppose the current power structure. Or indeed, I think they all think that’s exactly what they’re doing.
But no one is doing that in reality, right or left. The people who are pushing pronouns are not in charge. The people who are pushing restrictive abortion laws are not in charge. Neither of those “cultural” sideshows, as annoying as they are, is the real problem. These are distractions set up by the plundering class, and they seem to have worked quite well. We’re pointing fingers at the “other side” and how crazy they are, while the plunderers rob us all.
The people who are in charge are those who are enriching themselves generations after generation, and impoverishing the rest of us, who can barely pay off education loans or pay rent, much less buy a home or go on a vacation. My kids won’t be doing better than I did, or even as well. They’re smart, hardworking kids. Something’s really messed up.
No one of my acquaintance has a solid plan or strategy to really challenge entrenched power. They’re all off down blind cultural alleys, chasing the wrong Bad Guys, if you ask me.
I’m very far left, I oppose the current power structure, and I don’t have a good plan for effecting change either. So I’m just like everyone else I’m complaining about. I’m no better. I don’t have the answers.
All’s I’ve got is this notion that we all need to compare notes and talk to each other more effectively and recognize our shared interests. I think a broad-based coalition of “everyone who is not part of the currently entrenched plundering elite” is necessary before we can do anything. The first step is realizing that the people espousing loony fringe cultural issues are not anyone’s real enemy, except insofar as they keep all of us distracted and at each other’s throats.
Salon, I come in peace. Lol! You describe yourself as very far left. You write about interesting topics. I enjoy your thoughts. You delve into forbidden ground. I love that
Hope is not lost. It's not even hanging by a thread. The ruling class wants us to believe that. I hated microeconomics in college. I've come to realize it's what runs the world. Individual decisions. The more purely we can make them- about our dwelling, our education, our livelihood, our purchases- the better off we are. All of us
When we face a problem at work, we know intuitively the further away from the problem decisions are made, the worse the outcome. Problematic structures take power away from the source. In power becomes it's own commodity
I responded to a Greenwald piece several months ago and it seemed to resonate with a few people. I wrote about explaining power structures to a millennial I was mentoring, who expressed some of the sentiment you shared above- lack of a promising future in the face of what we call the ruling class. We first have to understand, where did the ruling class come from? He blamed capitalism. He missed a word. Crony capitalism. That's where it comes from
Here's my analogy. Pretend you own a little coffee shop. One of your primary inputs is water, which comes from the city. The water commissioner wants to "green up" the water supply. Could be any reason,, but anyway, the initiative requires an additional user fee (tax) on water usage
As a small shop owner you may even agree with the endeavor, but you lament paying a higher price, either raising prices with McDonald's across the street, or seeing slim margins go lower. What are you to do?
Coincidentally the paper company down the street faces the same issue. They use lots of water. They'll take the commissioner out for a nice round of golf, hire his spouse for a consulting contract and, like magic, receive a special carve out on the levee. They'll also contribute to hiss campaign and splash his special initiative all over their website. He receives backdoor money and local prestige
As a small business owner you might join an association that lobbies your interests. It won't be nearly as effective but it gives you a marginal voice. How about your neighbors, the plumber,,the cop, who use water at a retail level? They have no voice and will pay the biggest relative price
Note how all this started- with a "well-intended" initiative by a government beuacrat. What does the beuacrat learn? Intervention = $, prestige and more power. What does the business learn? Hell yes. For a small price we buy competitive advantage by kissing the ring. What do you get? The shaft
That's not capitalism. It's Crony capitalism
Many far left people believe the Sanders approach can rid the government of dark money in politics. It's the exact opposite. You cannot rid money in politics by putting politics in money. Whenever you centralize power, you are forcing ring kissing, and the least powerful will ALWAYS be last in line
Like problems at work, in order to regain power, politics must be as local, and as small, as possible. Still, where ever there's government, power structures will grow around it. It's inevitable. And the very people they seek to "help" (wink, wink) wind up paying the biggest price
So why is there hope? Because the unseen has become visible to a lot of people around the world. We're witnessing increasingly desperate acts of whack a mole from a collapsing power structure that can no longer hide it. Oh things may get ugly, but collapse it will. It requires us to stop accepting the sources of power (ala green new deal) and focusing on restoring local politics, as we've seen even in CA
Restoring local politics is not a bad thing. Indeed part of the problem is that this nation is too big for a representative democracy. We’ve got 2 senators and 37 million people in CA. Will a senator ever read my letter? Anyone’s letter? But they have time to meet with Apple or Tesla or whoever.
But is not a guarantee of failure and corruption in every group effort where people pool their resources for the greater good. Most countries have health care for all, paid by taxes, and most of them have better health outcomes than we do. Scandinavian countries have better safety nets, better maternity leaves, more generous vacations, less onerous work hours, more secure retirements etc.
Not all programs run by governments are bad and corrupt or subject to cronyism. In a country where we bow down to wealth and power, where corporations are considered “persons” and their money is “protected political speech” then yes, we do have a sh*tshow.
Good points. We'll disagree to some extent on some things and that's fine. It's how we learn. A representative democracy is the only way to preserve minority rights. The problem isn't necessarily underrepresentation. It's the size and scope of government. We don't want them picking our car or cellphone or our breakfast cereal for us. The more decisions into which government intervenes, the more grievances from individuals who don't like the choice. That's my point above. Increased government in anything favors the powerful. They have more access and resources to win a desired outcome. That's not to blame the grievers. They only take issue when provoked. The corporations are similarly reacting to something thrust upon them, though obviously they'll lobby to enact legislation that benefits them. Minus the vehicle (government)-, corporations would have no reason to lobby
I'll give an example. Our company produces durable graphics that go on Yamaha waverunners, ATV's, mercury boat engines, decoration for all types of consumer products. The trucking company, Schneider national, has been a client for 50 years. Great company. 3M years ago developed reflective tape to make truck trailers much more visible at night, for safety. Great idea, so go sell it. The truck market, especially small operations, complained about the cost. 3M lobbied for, and received, legislation written so as to create a monopoly position for 3M, essentially spec'ing out competitive products. So we are forced to buy 3M reflective products and pass them along to Schneider. While a good invention with a safety track, 3M used legislation that made transportation more expensive for everyone else through cronyism
Our company invents a lot of neat things too. As a midsized company, do we have the ability to do what 3M did? No way. The big get bigger because they pull this shit everyday. The only reason it works is because government has the power to mandate, and write it in such a way that it creastes a monopoly in a situation that had other viable products. You likely see that 3M tape hundreds of times a day without having any idea the cronyism that started it
The more centralized the power, the more cronyism takes place. Remove the power, remove the cronyism, legal and illegal
This applies the same in medical care. People blame insurance companies ( as does the unaccountable government of course) for riding costs. Guess who's the biggest 'insurer" of all? Medicare and medicaid. They get to essentially mandate pricing for procedures, often at half of what it actually costs. Where does the shortfall go? Private insurance! Which then takes the political and consumer blame because it's confusing and no one hears about it. This is one of the biggest tax shifts in the country. Is it any wonder people view mc/mc positively and insurers as robber barrens, when the opposite is the case
I lived in europe for 3 years. I saw people wait 6 months for surgery after a skiing accident. So we definitely get a filtered story. Another factor is that everyone in those countries pay taxes. They have some skin in the game. Our tax code is far more regressive, where only about 50% of our citizens pay at the federal (and states where it exists) level. They also have fairly homogenous societies relative to the US, where immigration and assimilation present different challenges
I agree, not all collective efforts breed cronyism and corruption. But they don't have what the government does- the power to intervene and disrupt decision making in society with authority to back it up. This is often done out of Washington, in cookie cutter fashion, far removed from the unique challenges faced by states and local communities. Unlike the populous and businesses, government acts as an accountability-free enterprise. It no longer even worries about the press. It operates with virtual impunity
It's also the enterprise that benefits the most from private success. Our company, as a Sub-S, pays ovwe 50% of our earnings in taxes of one kind or another. Meanwhile, they don't lose sleep over making payroll, satisfying clients or acquiring material, which they've now also completely fucked up. They have no risk, no worries, yet they get to keep more than those who do, while claiming moral high ground by barking about businesses not paying their fair share. The capper- the payers have almost no control over the quality of services
I'm venting a bit, but I just don't ever see good answers via government. And ours is the best. I respect and understand your position. I just hold a different perspective. Cheers, Salon!
The culture war stuff is largely a deliberate cultivation of the hegemons. There are certainly true-believers in pronouns and DIE, but their fanaticism serves mainly to puzzle and enrage people, who then perceive them as the primary enemy when in fact, they're NPCs, nothing more than foot soldiers with delusional pseudo-ideologies who don't even realize the masters they serve.
For myself, I've spent quite a bit of time in left circles (I was an Occupy era leftist), and quite a bit of time in rightist circles. The flavor and emphasis differs, but the core desires are largely held in common. It's that commonality of interests that the ruling class is desperate to keep people from perceiving.
As to solutions, they exist. But they start with abandoning any sense of loyalty to the institutions, and letting go of attachments to the narratives that we've been inculcated with through those institutions.
I agree we’re fucked. I’ve really been struggling — seeing humans as having passed a point from which we’re just not coming back. We’re waiting for the end. It’s depressing.
Yes. The scale of this feels bigger, though. We’re going to keep seeing worse pathogens getting out and bam: one day it’ll be some kind of avian flu souped up for human destruction and we’re done.
If we do manage to turn this around, I hope we will have learned something about putting too much faith and power in supposed experts who always claim to know what’s best for us.
I think the bigger problem is with “real experts” who are holding back the truth in a self-serving way, undermining everyone’s faith in the process (and in some cases, faith in science).
Thanks for an excellent article. These are important and disturbing questions.
I don't think it is an overstatement to say that public confidence in experts of all kinds has been severely impaired by COVID, its origins, and the response to it. It feels like the curtain has been pulled back a little and revealed not a harmless wizard, but a frightening gargoyle.
By the way, a famous novel ends with American society destroyed by obviously evil experiments conducted by the State Science Institute, headed by the most respected scientist in the country.
Subject-matter experts are valuable in theory, which is to say under ideal circumstances. Problem is that credentialization and control of research funding has turned the expert class into a cadre of frightened yes-men who by and large say only that which advances the favored narrative of Power, and assiduously avoid saying anything that contradicts it. An expert is now defined as one who agrees with experts; thus for example, medical professionals who publicly dissented from COVID dogmas were immediately excoriated as crazy conspiracy mongers ... regardless of how many honors, publications, or Nobel prizes they possessed.
The implication is not that one should ignore expertise; that would be far too simplistic. Blind belief and blind disbelief are both blind. Rather, one must always parse what a given voice is saying inside of the context of the power relations that govern behavior in the academy, research institutes, and the state and corporate bureaucracies. Those relations are guided by the interests of the powerful, and those lines of force can be followed; voices that align themselves along those vectors should be regarded with suspicion; voices that don't so align are more likely to be guided by their own internal compasses of reason and morality, and while they might not always be correct, experience suggests they're much more likely to be at least honest.
As one example, it's often said - particularly on the left - that "we couldn't have known" X about COVID. And yet, in the very early days, before lockdowns wrecked our world, we had the Diamond Princess. The statistical epidemiologist John Ioannidis analyzed that floating petri dish and concluded that the case fatality rate was on the order of 0.1% - comparable to a bad flu, but not worth panicking over. Ioannidis had previously distinguished himself by blowing holes in the biomedical literature by demonstrating that the overwhelming majority of it was based on statistically insignificant false correlations. He pissed off a lot of powerful people by doing that, and therefore, was worth listening to. As it turns out, he was right. Anyone paying attention at the time, and exercising the basic discernment of interpreting media messaging through the lens of power relations, had good reason to doubt that COVID would be the next black death. And, as it turned out - Ioannidis was right. In other words, not only could we have known - if you knew where to look, we did.
It's similar with the lab leak scenario. That was obvious from day 1. It was only non-obvious if one persisted in giving the organs of power the benefit of the doubt; which, frankly, after decades of endless deceptions, is just obtuse.
I would say, if one’s perspective was of someone who was not taking care of dying people in understaffed hospitals that were so full with covid patients that people with heart attacks and injuries from car accidents couldn’t get care -- and I assure you, that was very real -- it makes sense that someone safely on the sidelines can crunch the numbers and say “0.1%? pfft bad flu” (although clearly it was worse than a bad flu. Since when were we loading the excess bodies into refrigerated cars during a bad flu season?; c’mon now).
There was and is a lot of minimization.
Now that death numbers really ARE down; now that we actually DO have some vaccines that do a little something, and we have some treatments that DO work to some extent; now that we’ve found ways to somewhat safely keep business and schools open (partly due to all the foregoing), it’s easy to say “see, dummies? We tolja all along it was not a big deal!”)
It was maybe not a big deal for healthy people who were not in the thick of it. But I assure you, it was a huge deal. I object to that kind of “I told you so” hindsight, because it always comes from people who were not dealing with the problem directly.
0.1% really is a bad flu, though. Excess mortality was comparable to many minor flu epidemics of the 21st century, which likewise primarily went after the elderly and infirm. It might seem callous, but then, never before in history have we destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of young people in the name of a few extra months of life for those already at the life expectancy. There were many, many people who pointed this out at the very beginning, and they were viciously smeared, and many had their careers ruined. Given that everything since - higher suicide and drug OD rates, the collapsing economy, all without having had any effect whatsoever on the epidemiological progress of the virus - has unfolded exactly as they predicted, entitles them to quite a bit of "I told you so." In fact, jamming that "I told you so" down the throats of the pied pipers who led us down this primrose path to ruin may be the only way to ensure this never happens again. In that context, "we couldn't have known" is just a cope, a way for people to avoid saying "I was wrong".
As to treatments, we've had hydroxchloroquine and ivermectin from the start. They work. Simple as. Had the manipulators not engaged in every dishonest trick in the book, deaths would have been a lot lower. But then, they wouldn't have gotten the EUAs for the "vaccines" that "sort of" work, and think of all the hundreds of billions of lability-free revenues that would have been lost then.
And honestly, now that we're watching those "vaccines" fail in real time, with often rather horrific consequences due to their shocking side effect profiles, we're seeing "we couldn't have known" get dusted off again. Despite the fact that, once again, there were many voices warning about what we're seeing, right from the beginning.
There’s so much I disagree with in this assessment, but it’s stuff I’ve addressed in other places so I’m not prepared to go there today.
My perspective is that the public was mildly inconvenienced for a couple years, and for a good reason: to preserve a halfway functioning medical infrastructure for the good of all.
We’re just not used to sacrificing any convenience or pleasure in our culture; we’re not used to not getting our way 24/7, and so some temporary restrictions on going to restaurants and movies and school and office closures, while unpleasant and inconvenient, were perceived in some quarters as a cataclysmic disaster.
The young suffered, just as everyone else did, because this was a terrible historical event. The young’s lives weren’t destroyed by a couple years of hardship — in fact, if they were raised to be resilient at all, if they were raised to think of anyone other than themselves, they did just fine.
The goal wasn’t to “save a few worthless old people who were about to die anyway.” The goal wasn’t to trample on everyone’s precious freedoms. The goal was to preserve a functioning health care infrastructure during a disaster. I’ll just leave it at that.
Fascinating. You've started to grok the unreliability of the expert class, yet still cling to the narratives that were pushed in order to centralize wealth and control to a historically unprecedented degree, e.g. that a "disaster" threatened the health care system (no such disaster ever materialized; further, the models that predicted disaster, e.g. Ferguson's fabulism, were discredited as sloppy nonsense almost from the moment they came out). There's a direct line between attachment to those narratives, and the inability to see a way out. As long as you hold to those prejudices, you won't see solutions to the problems you identify.
I never said the elderly are "worthless". I said they were elderly. Old people die. Simple as. If that can be postponed, great. But if doing so comes at the expense of destroying the lives of the young by locking them inside, delaying their development, depriving them of a social life, and wrecking the economy they depend on for any hope of future prosperity, it's deeply immoral. The fact that we went along with that speaks to the moral vacuum of our social order.
"Jamming that "I told you so" down the throats of the pied pipers who led us down this primrose path to ruin may be the only way to ensure this never happens again."
100% agree. And it needs to happen immediately, because they are already doing the same thing with energy policy and climate change. Sri Lanka has given us an early warning of what can happen.
What, are you saying you don't want to be 'mildly inconvenienced' with rolling blackouts, a diet of soy and bugs, life in a pod, and an overall quality of life that a Roman slave would have regarded as inhumane? You don't think that would help to forestall the global supercatastrophe of average temperatures increasing by a fraction of a degree over the course of the next century? You right-wing monster.
This is how people radicalize. Unfortunately for this reason all these things are somehow "left-coded" so people figure this out and then move far-right.
I wouldn't expect the origins discussion to be brought up in the workplace context. It's terribly important, but it's a seprate (and much bigger?) question.
There's "Here's what we see happening around us. Here's how things might develop. Here's what you should do. We'll get back to you as things change and we know more."
And there's "How does society deal with the fact that we have the ability to create bioweapons? Especially given that we know how, somebody somewhere will probably do it?"
These questions seemed to work at odds with each other at the beginning of Covid when it felt like blame-it-on-China would send us way off task. (Especially since the truth was closer to blame-it on-us.)
But yes, our elites have shown themselves incompetent and dishonest, and that doesn't bode well.
Yes, the origin question was a separate question from how to deal with COVID. It should have been investigated immediately by the many government agencies tasked with national security and defense. It would not have been necessary to divert public health resources and attention away from their primary task.
“Finding the truth” is a more appropriate characterization than “blame China”. And yes, certainly there is plenty of blame to go around.
I think what makes it hard is the fact that we’re doing this to ourselves.
If it were some natural event like a (real) plague or a meteor hitting the earth and making it impossible for humans to live, somehow in my mind such an event would be easier to deal with?
“Well, that’s an indifferent universe for ya.”
The fact that we’re doing this to ourselves, and we could choose not to, but we’re not choosing not to, is actually driving me crazy.
So there's COVID, the youth transgender stuff, the p-hacking/replication crises, and then the humanities-are-weird now that deBoer has written about (see: Writing Studies, the Field that Hates Itself). I'm sure we're only a few years away from someone generating this sort of academic writing with an AI.
I wonder what the long-run equilibrium on all this is. I think universities will see some cuts going forward. We will also probably put more faith in people with hard math and science backgrounds.
I think it was profoundly fucked up for experts to try to mix their normative politics with their descriptive science. It just makes me take them less seriously on both.
Politics and science are a very sickening mix.
Long run, the universities will hemorrhage credibility and, therefore, prestige. They'll then start to fail economically. An expensive degree is much less useful as a social signalling device when it no longer communicates intellectual acumen, but rather the opposite. This is already happening, with many employers actively preferring not to hire university graduates, and many youth weighing the cost against the benefit of a university education and finding the comparison unfavorable.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-dieing-prestige-of-the-academy
The universities are in the toilet, no doubt. People, even our elite, seem unable to evaluate what’s true or likely, and the universities are just indoctrination centers. When my oldest went to college, I didn’t quite realize this, and I sent him off with giddy hope and excitement about how much he’d learn and how much his horizons and mind would be expanded. I just laugh at this naive notion now.
And while in theory I thought, well, maybe the new places like Ralston or UofAustin will make a difference and find a niche, I decided those seem to be conservative projects and have their own issues. Of course conservatives deserve a voice and you can see how thoroughly they’ve been shut out everywhere else. Of course they need a home. But we need a place for everyone to gather. Having two parallel educational tracks, left and right, just perpetuates the problems we already have.
Again, I’m not saying I have the answers. I actually just think we’re all fucked and heading for a quick extinction or perhaps just societal collapse and a new Dark Age.
Conservative universities aren't the answer; that's just a different kind of indoctrination center in the long run.
The solution won't be found in new universities. It will need to be something very different, much more fluid and open. We have this prejudice that scholarship and education must be coordinated in large institutes, but there's no particular reason that it couldn't operate more in the way of law firm partnerships or small gyms - scholars working alone or in small, independent groups. Ultimately the problem we face is one of overbearing managerial oversight, which has stripped liberty from the world in the name of safety and efficiency. That's not just true in universities, but everywhere. The answer is to look for ways of doing the opposite, and rendering the managerial class obsolete and surplus to requirements.
“ scholars working alone or in small, independent groups” is part of the problem— even at large universities, that’s what we have now: people who are so sub-sub-sub specialized that they have no idea what the guy down the hall does.
I agree with getting rid of bureaucracy, levels and levels of useless administrators— but I don’t yet see an alternative to universities that does what society needs them to do.
Ah, I need to be more specific there. Yes, hyper-specialization is a problem. I was referring more to income independence. In fact, if scholars became genuinely independent - that is, not reliant on the sufferance of an impersonal bureaucracy - I suspect the hyper-specialization problem would solve itself. Same way that a family doctor has to be a generalist.
Great article!
I wouldn't worry too much about our future though, yet.
It's been like this since the beginning of time. Smart people get their mouths shut by big money/power/influence etc.
And I can't blame these scientists. When your life could be on the line and potentially the well-being of family and friends, who wouldn't give in?
It's absolutely understandable, although undeniably frustrating, but it's been like this forever - it's human nature.
The good thing is, we've always been able to overcome such tragedies and reached the point where we are at right now.
The bad thing is, we reached magnitudes of orders that can quickly change the whole world.
So it's the usual. Staying alert and critical, asking provoking questions while not losing one's self mentally.
Such is life and I'm optimistic it will stay this way through all the coming hardships that will certainly arise again and again.
Cheers
I’m so glad you’re more optimistic than I am! Yes, I do see this as a problem that has existed forever, but I don’t see that in the past there was such potential for anyone with a master’s degree and a few thousand bucks to wipe out humankind. We didn’t have that knowledge, technology, or personal power in the past. I think these are dangerous times, and stupidity will end us. I hope I’m very wrong!
"And I can't blame these scientists. When your life could be on the line and potentially the well-being of family and friends, who wouldn't give in?"
I'm curious what you mean by this. Do you think their lives and the well-being of family and friends were threatened? If so, by whom? While I believe their current positions could have been in jeopardy, it's hard for me to believe the perceived danger extended any further than that.
Most definitely.
Not to shed too much light on my private life, but part of my family used to hold positions where they were in contact with the officials of eastern Germany. It was the norm to be told what to say in specific scenarios, especially in crisis times or else you would lose your job and potentially get spied on even more or worse, be put into certain facilities. A mentally retarded relative, for e.g. was held in captivity for a long time in his life.
So I think I have some first-hand experience which makes me erase the "wow that's such a crazy conspiracy" picture.
Now about what you said. Certainly, what does the well-being of your family mean to you? Losing a specific source of income or job security? Physical pain?
Well, the "good" thing is that both happen regularly around the world and we have lots of knowledge about them.
Just to name something that is currently happening which even the German media picked up.
Russian oligarchs dying left and right, or Chinese billionaires disappearing. People not only in high ranking positions, but also simply with lots of influence, constantly get intimidated or pushed into a certain direction. Looking into countries with lots of corruption, it's easily visible there, but in the US this will certainly happen behind closed curtains.
For this specific case I will just say "Shi Zhengli", the head of the wuhan institute.
Who does it? Well, it could be anyone ranging from the government, to opposition or simple feuds over job positions.
But we know this, we've known this throughout history - it always gets written down years later, so it would be foolish to think this isn't happening.
That's why I said it's completely understandable and I would definitely do the same if someone approached me. There are certain things you can't go against without making life hell.
In Germany, we have police now scouring comments and if they tell you off you better do it or you pay a hefty sum or worse, you can even go to prison, so if the day comes I would even stop "critical" comments on the internet and then it's back to secret clubs and meetings underground ;)
There is so much interesting stuff in this comment, “in Germany, we have police now scouring comments and if they tell you off you better do it or you pay a hefty sum or worse, you can even go to prison.”
What sort of things do they object to? And what outcomes do they want? Do they want people to remove the comment? Edit it?
I’ve heard one or twice that Shi Zhengli “disappeared” but I had no way of verifying if it’s true or if it’s just crazy-talk.
There's a lot to it. So I will give you two links.
The first is an English Wikipedia page with a bit of information about one of the laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act
And the second one is a German Wikipedia page, but with Deepl translator it should be fine.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasskommentar#Gesetzlich
Basically it's supposed to work against hate speech, but clearly that's not how it's used and you can see it daily in German youtube comment sections.
I wrote a comment about how you called certain people in Ukraine Nazis and that I don't agree with it etc.
I could basically file a complaint against you for diffamation, because of my differing views.
And the Nazis are a very delicate topic in Germany so it would be problematic.
What do we learn from this? Don't use clear names in German web, when you post opposing views :D
Well, there is so much talk about disappearances or weird police visits, including expats who lived there, that it seems likely to be true, especially under such circumstances.
Thank you for these links! I really appreciate it!!
How would you verify that it is true? The Chinese government would certainly not issue a press release if they had arrested her. There are alternatives between "it's been completely verified" and "it's crazy talk".
If I may offer some constructive criticism of the left in general, the “crazy talk, misinformation” label is trotted out far too quickly and easily. I thought your post was a good illustration of this.
“Crazy talk” should be reserved for extreme examples. Like alien abduction, JFK secretly survived, or Hillary runs a sex ring out of a pizza parlor.
Too many things that were deemed “crazy” have turned out to be true:
The CIA colluded with the Mafia to murder Castro.
Nixon really was involved in covering up a “third-rate burglary”.
Ulcers are in fact caused by a bacteria, not stress.
Hunter’s laptop is real, not “Russian disinformation”.
“Russian collusion”, on the other hand, was not.
I think we would all benefit if accusations of “misinformation” and “crazy talk” were scaled back tremendously. People have different perspectives; accusing them of being crazy does not advance the conversation. Better to ask “why do you think that?” and listen to the answer.
Thank you for the informative response, although it makes it harder for me to share your optimism.
We Americans know that such things go on, but our mantra has always been "it can't happen here". And that is protection for the perpetrators- Americans will refuse to believe it is happening. The "conspiracy theorist" label will be vigorously applied to any who try to point out that it might be happening. If that doesn't do the trick to shut them up, then ...? Like you, I don't think this was a benign instance of scientists lying to themselves.
This was a thought-provoking and sobering article. I initially dismissed the lab-leak theory out of hand because 1. I had read something somewhere that the changes from SARS to Covid-19 looked like other viral evolutions that happen naturally, and 2. Because my online friends who were promoting the lab-leak hypothesis were politically on the right and had shown bias against China in the past. I am embarrassed to say that I was unbecomingly dismissive of their arguments.
I think we still can’t say how Covid and our current version of monkeypox came to be, but it is worrisome that there still seems to be a taboo on discussing gain-of-function research and even more so on regular people saying, “Is this kind of research really worth the risk?! Why are we doing it?!”
I hadn’t even thought of this point before: “People who were pushing the natural origin had their entire careers at stake. If gain-of-function research stops, their funding stops. Their entire careers stop. So…they had every reason to lie to themselves that the origin wasn’t all that important, anyway.” Researchers wouldn’t need to be openly self-interested in refusing to look at information supporting the lab-leak theory; just a slight bias against the conclusion that gain-of-function research is dangerous would be enough to cause motivated reasoning, and also the taboo on discussing the lab-leak theory.
Yes— I really think most people are basically good, and yet we are all unconsciously tempted to lie to ourselves when the benefit swings one way or another.
I think at this point, looking at GoF as anything other than very risky bioweapons research is very difficult indeed. None of the stories about “it will help us develop treatments and vaccines” seems remotely plausible. They can’t point to one treatment, one breakthrough, one vaccine. All they have to show for it is dangerous pathogens.
And even if the folks doing the research are looking at it as some kind of deterrent (“We need the worst viruses, because if we don’t create them, the other guys will”) it’s clear that compared to, say, nuclear weapons, accidents are much more likely, and the outcome is impossible to contain. SARS-2 didn’t stay in China. It went everywhere. Viruses are crappy weapons.
This stuff could really end us. At the very least, it will continue to cause needless human suffering, and it’s driving me crazy to think about how few people seem to be thinking about this or wanting to do something about it.
Even the (now apparently inactive) Cambridge Working Group is eerily quiet. Richard Ebright is rather sassy on Twitter, but that’s about it.
And then as you point out: the lab leak stuff was picked up by the anti-China fringe early on, which gave it very little credibility in everyone else’s eyes. When the fringes pick up an idea, lots of other wacky ideas seem to get attached to it, and that prevents people from taking it seriously.
In fact, sometimes I wonder whether our intelligence community handles stories it wants to bury by amplifying them in the lunatic fringes with a lot of added colorful details. Baby and bath water. No one’s gonna take a lab leak seriously when on the one hand the Lancet publishes a respectable letter with top scientists signing it, and on the other hand Q Anon is babbling incoherently and with bad spelling and grammar about the evil Chinese trying to kill us all, and by the way Fauci’s in on it.
But in the mainstream, among the scientists who should know better: Why is no one taking about these viruses and what a big problem this research is? Can’t Fauci even admit after 6.4 million people are dead that this research was a bad idea? He’s in the thick of it. He doesn’t seem like an evil guy. He’s like what, almost 80? He won’t be here much longer. Is he really worried about his job or reputation, more so than the fate of future generations?
It would be hard to admit that your entire career was hurtful rather than helpful. Who goes into a career thinking that an accidental lab leak could kill 6.4 million people (probably more, and it’s still going to be killing people after you’re dead)?
"Can’t Fauci even admit after 6.4 million people are dead that this research was a bad idea? He’s in the thick of it. He doesn’t seem like an evil guy. He’s like what, almost 80? He won’t be here much longer. Is he really worried about his job or reputation, more so than the fate of future generations?" It's not just his job and reputation. If the lab leak hypothesis is correct, the US is probably implicated as well due to the NIH funding the EcoHealth Alliance's work (archived from Vanity Fair: https://archive.ph/oiZTa). Other countries would probably clamor for the US and China to pay enormous sums in restitution, with good reason. This may be overly conspiratorial, but I wouldn't be surprised if Fauci is being pressured by intelligence to prevent the truth from coming to light, assuming the lab leak hypothesis is true.
Also possible. Yes. Restitution or not (and it’s merited) any decent person should still advocate for shutting down this research. They could even take the playing-dumb tactic of “oops I guess we’ll never know” (even though that’s not true) and say “better safe than sorry; let’s shut down this research just in case.”
I understand your point about the Lancet, but didn't the idea that the virus leaked from Wuhan seem like a possibility to be considered? Didn't it seem odd that there was near-hysteria at the thought that anyone could take it seriously? Why the zeal to paint it as xenophobic? Where were our critical thinking skills? Buried under contempt for the rubes who could doubt The Lancet.
And is it really likely that the scientists who choose a career in virology do not at least contemplate the possibility that a lab leak could kill millions of people?
I think anyone who read the Lancet and Nature articles with a critical eye thought something was weird about those, and shortly after that, it was more widely understood that a lab that studied bat coronaviruses was right there in Wuhan. IIRC I wasn’t aware of that fact until April when I saw Yuri Deigin’s Medium article (most of which still impressively holds up years later, even though this wasn’t his specific area and he was dealing with very partial sets of facts).
So yes, a few people considered it, and eventually the weight of the evidence was there for anyone to see (the book helped a lot, some of the long form articles helped a lot), but for the typical smart person who has other interests and their own career to worry about and who doesn’t read about this stuff as a hobby (or second full-time job), it would have seemed kind of loony-tunes, I think, for many months. And eventually the zoonosis story took on the patina of “established fact— we’ve known this for ages!” so that even smart critical thinkers might still not want to revisit that lab leak possibility. Then you have to consider what all one’s friends and family believe. If the received wisdom in your circles is that it came from a bat, and you know previous outbreaks came from nature, and you’re not a science fanatic, why would you think too much more about it?
It makes sense to me on the level of human psychology and how all our minds work.
And whether scientists thought a lab leak would kills millions of people, I think they all believe “it won’t happen to us because we’re really careful.” Unrealistic optimism is a real thing!
I guess my mind just works differently. To me, Common Sense 101, combined with the massive implications of a lab leak (as you have eloquently outlined in your post) should have demanded a thorough investigation of the lab standing in the epicenter of the outbreak. Which just coincidentally was researching bat coronaviruses.
But all the smart people were too busy denouncing the crazy right wingers and screaming about dangerous misinformation.
Right, but having seen this happen to “your” side, does it make you wonder whether it’s ever happening in reverse? Does it make you wonder whether the propaganda runs both ways?
For example, I’ve seen stuff about the anti-racist teaching in schools where people on the right say that the people on the left are trying to make white kids hate themselves.
So, I can think the anti-racist teaching in schools is really dumb and counterproductive and actually promotes racial division and decreases people’s likelihood of trying to befriend people from other races -- all bad stuff-- without thinking that the left’s actual project is to cause anyone to hate themselves.
China and Fauci weren’t trying to kill people en masse, just as the loony faux left isn’t trying to make children hate themselves.
But once we cast “those people over there” as the mustache-twirling bad guys, we decrease the likelihood of engaging with them productively. Why would you engage productively with a monster?
It was easier to see the lab leak as common sense if the people you hang out with were also considering it. And it was harder to see the lab leak as common sense if the people you hung out with thought it was crazy-talk and came from “bad people.”
If “your side” already holds the correct-ish view, it’s easier to say “Just common sense!”
Of course I recognize that the propaganda and fear mongering happen on both sides, and both sides seem hell -bent on promoting their version of group think. But I don't find it understandable and excusable when people eagerly indulge in it and proclaim it a virtue.
I also recognize that the left is not trying to make children hate themselves, and that Fauci was not trying to kill people. But I believe results matter, not simply the lack of bad intent. As I taught my son many years ago, maybe you didn't mean to spill the milk, but the milk is still on the floor. At some point we know as parents that you have to take the cup of milk away from the person who keeps "accidentally" dumping it on the floor.
I guess I'm just a simplistic thinker but I think Pink Floyd summed it up. " Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone".
'Politically on the right' is now simply code for 'opposes the current power structure'. Since the powerful are proven liars, it follows that only the opposition will be at least potentially truthful. Those who continue to react allergically and mindlessly to accusations that a given voice is a 'right-winger' will continue falling for the propaganda, and continue wondering why events always take them by surprise.
I do think anyone who is paying attention to how our country has been run (for some time, in the interests of business and the ruling elite) believes they oppose the current power structure. Right or left, they believe this.
The loony faux left believes the problem is with “rights” and “oppression” and can be solved with things like DEI. (The real left, of which there are very few remaining, believe the problem can be solved by addressing economic issues.)
I’m not sure what the _loony_ right believes, since I travel more in left circles (although I’ve seen a lot of weird anti-vax and Q anon posts over the years, enough to maybe get a glimmer of what the fringe-right might believe?) but I do know when Trump was running for president, many of my very decent and kind conservative friends believed he indeed was going to “drain the swamp” and shake things up, ie, oppose the current power structure--when in fact, while he was definitely an outsider to politics and to the brand of fake-smooth political speech that was once considered prerequisite to success, he didn’t drain the swamp at all. He enriched the swamp.
Many decent people on the right just want decent opportunities for everyone and to be left alone. They don’t want to worry about announcing their pronouns, they don’t want every interaction to be a gotcha-minefield of CorrectSpeak, and they want the loony left to shut up. That’s a lot of common ground between my friends on the right and me.
So..: I think anyone, left or right, who sees the mess we’re in wants to oppose the current power structure. Or indeed, I think they all think that’s exactly what they’re doing.
But no one is doing that in reality, right or left. The people who are pushing pronouns are not in charge. The people who are pushing restrictive abortion laws are not in charge. Neither of those “cultural” sideshows, as annoying as they are, is the real problem. These are distractions set up by the plundering class, and they seem to have worked quite well. We’re pointing fingers at the “other side” and how crazy they are, while the plunderers rob us all.
The people who are in charge are those who are enriching themselves generations after generation, and impoverishing the rest of us, who can barely pay off education loans or pay rent, much less buy a home or go on a vacation. My kids won’t be doing better than I did, or even as well. They’re smart, hardworking kids. Something’s really messed up.
No one of my acquaintance has a solid plan or strategy to really challenge entrenched power. They’re all off down blind cultural alleys, chasing the wrong Bad Guys, if you ask me.
I’m very far left, I oppose the current power structure, and I don’t have a good plan for effecting change either. So I’m just like everyone else I’m complaining about. I’m no better. I don’t have the answers.
All’s I’ve got is this notion that we all need to compare notes and talk to each other more effectively and recognize our shared interests. I think a broad-based coalition of “everyone who is not part of the currently entrenched plundering elite” is necessary before we can do anything. The first step is realizing that the people espousing loony fringe cultural issues are not anyone’s real enemy, except insofar as they keep all of us distracted and at each other’s throats.
Salon, I come in peace. Lol! You describe yourself as very far left. You write about interesting topics. I enjoy your thoughts. You delve into forbidden ground. I love that
Hope is not lost. It's not even hanging by a thread. The ruling class wants us to believe that. I hated microeconomics in college. I've come to realize it's what runs the world. Individual decisions. The more purely we can make them- about our dwelling, our education, our livelihood, our purchases- the better off we are. All of us
When we face a problem at work, we know intuitively the further away from the problem decisions are made, the worse the outcome. Problematic structures take power away from the source. In power becomes it's own commodity
I responded to a Greenwald piece several months ago and it seemed to resonate with a few people. I wrote about explaining power structures to a millennial I was mentoring, who expressed some of the sentiment you shared above- lack of a promising future in the face of what we call the ruling class. We first have to understand, where did the ruling class come from? He blamed capitalism. He missed a word. Crony capitalism. That's where it comes from
Here's my analogy. Pretend you own a little coffee shop. One of your primary inputs is water, which comes from the city. The water commissioner wants to "green up" the water supply. Could be any reason,, but anyway, the initiative requires an additional user fee (tax) on water usage
As a small shop owner you may even agree with the endeavor, but you lament paying a higher price, either raising prices with McDonald's across the street, or seeing slim margins go lower. What are you to do?
Coincidentally the paper company down the street faces the same issue. They use lots of water. They'll take the commissioner out for a nice round of golf, hire his spouse for a consulting contract and, like magic, receive a special carve out on the levee. They'll also contribute to hiss campaign and splash his special initiative all over their website. He receives backdoor money and local prestige
As a small business owner you might join an association that lobbies your interests. It won't be nearly as effective but it gives you a marginal voice. How about your neighbors, the plumber,,the cop, who use water at a retail level? They have no voice and will pay the biggest relative price
Note how all this started- with a "well-intended" initiative by a government beuacrat. What does the beuacrat learn? Intervention = $, prestige and more power. What does the business learn? Hell yes. For a small price we buy competitive advantage by kissing the ring. What do you get? The shaft
That's not capitalism. It's Crony capitalism
Many far left people believe the Sanders approach can rid the government of dark money in politics. It's the exact opposite. You cannot rid money in politics by putting politics in money. Whenever you centralize power, you are forcing ring kissing, and the least powerful will ALWAYS be last in line
Like problems at work, in order to regain power, politics must be as local, and as small, as possible. Still, where ever there's government, power structures will grow around it. It's inevitable. And the very people they seek to "help" (wink, wink) wind up paying the biggest price
So why is there hope? Because the unseen has become visible to a lot of people around the world. We're witnessing increasingly desperate acts of whack a mole from a collapsing power structure that can no longer hide it. Oh things may get ugly, but collapse it will. It requires us to stop accepting the sources of power (ala green new deal) and focusing on restoring local politics, as we've seen even in CA
Restoring local politics is not a bad thing. Indeed part of the problem is that this nation is too big for a representative democracy. We’ve got 2 senators and 37 million people in CA. Will a senator ever read my letter? Anyone’s letter? But they have time to meet with Apple or Tesla or whoever.
But is not a guarantee of failure and corruption in every group effort where people pool their resources for the greater good. Most countries have health care for all, paid by taxes, and most of them have better health outcomes than we do. Scandinavian countries have better safety nets, better maternity leaves, more generous vacations, less onerous work hours, more secure retirements etc.
Not all programs run by governments are bad and corrupt or subject to cronyism. In a country where we bow down to wealth and power, where corporations are considered “persons” and their money is “protected political speech” then yes, we do have a sh*tshow.
Good points. We'll disagree to some extent on some things and that's fine. It's how we learn. A representative democracy is the only way to preserve minority rights. The problem isn't necessarily underrepresentation. It's the size and scope of government. We don't want them picking our car or cellphone or our breakfast cereal for us. The more decisions into which government intervenes, the more grievances from individuals who don't like the choice. That's my point above. Increased government in anything favors the powerful. They have more access and resources to win a desired outcome. That's not to blame the grievers. They only take issue when provoked. The corporations are similarly reacting to something thrust upon them, though obviously they'll lobby to enact legislation that benefits them. Minus the vehicle (government)-, corporations would have no reason to lobby
I'll give an example. Our company produces durable graphics that go on Yamaha waverunners, ATV's, mercury boat engines, decoration for all types of consumer products. The trucking company, Schneider national, has been a client for 50 years. Great company. 3M years ago developed reflective tape to make truck trailers much more visible at night, for safety. Great idea, so go sell it. The truck market, especially small operations, complained about the cost. 3M lobbied for, and received, legislation written so as to create a monopoly position for 3M, essentially spec'ing out competitive products. So we are forced to buy 3M reflective products and pass them along to Schneider. While a good invention with a safety track, 3M used legislation that made transportation more expensive for everyone else through cronyism
Our company invents a lot of neat things too. As a midsized company, do we have the ability to do what 3M did? No way. The big get bigger because they pull this shit everyday. The only reason it works is because government has the power to mandate, and write it in such a way that it creastes a monopoly in a situation that had other viable products. You likely see that 3M tape hundreds of times a day without having any idea the cronyism that started it
The more centralized the power, the more cronyism takes place. Remove the power, remove the cronyism, legal and illegal
This applies the same in medical care. People blame insurance companies ( as does the unaccountable government of course) for riding costs. Guess who's the biggest 'insurer" of all? Medicare and medicaid. They get to essentially mandate pricing for procedures, often at half of what it actually costs. Where does the shortfall go? Private insurance! Which then takes the political and consumer blame because it's confusing and no one hears about it. This is one of the biggest tax shifts in the country. Is it any wonder people view mc/mc positively and insurers as robber barrens, when the opposite is the case
I lived in europe for 3 years. I saw people wait 6 months for surgery after a skiing accident. So we definitely get a filtered story. Another factor is that everyone in those countries pay taxes. They have some skin in the game. Our tax code is far more regressive, where only about 50% of our citizens pay at the federal (and states where it exists) level. They also have fairly homogenous societies relative to the US, where immigration and assimilation present different challenges
I agree, not all collective efforts breed cronyism and corruption. But they don't have what the government does- the power to intervene and disrupt decision making in society with authority to back it up. This is often done out of Washington, in cookie cutter fashion, far removed from the unique challenges faced by states and local communities. Unlike the populous and businesses, government acts as an accountability-free enterprise. It no longer even worries about the press. It operates with virtual impunity
It's also the enterprise that benefits the most from private success. Our company, as a Sub-S, pays ovwe 50% of our earnings in taxes of one kind or another. Meanwhile, they don't lose sleep over making payroll, satisfying clients or acquiring material, which they've now also completely fucked up. They have no risk, no worries, yet they get to keep more than those who do, while claiming moral high ground by barking about businesses not paying their fair share. The capper- the payers have almost no control over the quality of services
I'm venting a bit, but I just don't ever see good answers via government. And ours is the best. I respect and understand your position. I just hold a different perspective. Cheers, Salon!
A great job of explaining why more government is not the answer!
The culture war stuff is largely a deliberate cultivation of the hegemons. There are certainly true-believers in pronouns and DIE, but their fanaticism serves mainly to puzzle and enrage people, who then perceive them as the primary enemy when in fact, they're NPCs, nothing more than foot soldiers with delusional pseudo-ideologies who don't even realize the masters they serve.
For myself, I've spent quite a bit of time in left circles (I was an Occupy era leftist), and quite a bit of time in rightist circles. The flavor and emphasis differs, but the core desires are largely held in common. It's that commonality of interests that the ruling class is desperate to keep people from perceiving.
As to solutions, they exist. But they start with abandoning any sense of loyalty to the institutions, and letting go of attachments to the narratives that we've been inculcated with through those institutions.
Good piece of work. We’re pretty fucked, pardon my French
I agree we’re fucked. I’ve really been struggling — seeing humans as having passed a point from which we’re just not coming back. We’re waiting for the end. It’s depressing.
We’ll see. OTOH we’ve come back from worse. The Black Death, the Thirty Years War, the 1918 epidemic, WWI, WWII…
Yes. The scale of this feels bigger, though. We’re going to keep seeing worse pathogens getting out and bam: one day it’ll be some kind of avian flu souped up for human destruction and we’re done.
Possible. There have been lots of extinctions in the history of organic life, as we all know.
Yup
If we do manage to turn this around, I hope we will have learned something about putting too much faith and power in supposed experts who always claim to know what’s best for us.
I think the bigger problem is with “real experts” who are holding back the truth in a self-serving way, undermining everyone’s faith in the process (and in some cases, faith in science).
Thanks for an excellent article. These are important and disturbing questions.
I don't think it is an overstatement to say that public confidence in experts of all kinds has been severely impaired by COVID, its origins, and the response to it. It feels like the curtain has been pulled back a little and revealed not a harmless wizard, but a frightening gargoyle.
By the way, a famous novel ends with American society destroyed by obviously evil experiments conducted by the State Science Institute, headed by the most respected scientist in the country.
I haven’t read that one but it might be worth a look!!
It was published in 1957, amazingly prescient. But I don’t think you would like it. It is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
It’s important to read things we don’t like!!
Subject-matter experts are valuable in theory, which is to say under ideal circumstances. Problem is that credentialization and control of research funding has turned the expert class into a cadre of frightened yes-men who by and large say only that which advances the favored narrative of Power, and assiduously avoid saying anything that contradicts it. An expert is now defined as one who agrees with experts; thus for example, medical professionals who publicly dissented from COVID dogmas were immediately excoriated as crazy conspiracy mongers ... regardless of how many honors, publications, or Nobel prizes they possessed.
The implication is not that one should ignore expertise; that would be far too simplistic. Blind belief and blind disbelief are both blind. Rather, one must always parse what a given voice is saying inside of the context of the power relations that govern behavior in the academy, research institutes, and the state and corporate bureaucracies. Those relations are guided by the interests of the powerful, and those lines of force can be followed; voices that align themselves along those vectors should be regarded with suspicion; voices that don't so align are more likely to be guided by their own internal compasses of reason and morality, and while they might not always be correct, experience suggests they're much more likely to be at least honest.
As one example, it's often said - particularly on the left - that "we couldn't have known" X about COVID. And yet, in the very early days, before lockdowns wrecked our world, we had the Diamond Princess. The statistical epidemiologist John Ioannidis analyzed that floating petri dish and concluded that the case fatality rate was on the order of 0.1% - comparable to a bad flu, but not worth panicking over. Ioannidis had previously distinguished himself by blowing holes in the biomedical literature by demonstrating that the overwhelming majority of it was based on statistically insignificant false correlations. He pissed off a lot of powerful people by doing that, and therefore, was worth listening to. As it turns out, he was right. Anyone paying attention at the time, and exercising the basic discernment of interpreting media messaging through the lens of power relations, had good reason to doubt that COVID would be the next black death. And, as it turned out - Ioannidis was right. In other words, not only could we have known - if you knew where to look, we did.
It's similar with the lab leak scenario. That was obvious from day 1. It was only non-obvious if one persisted in giving the organs of power the benefit of the doubt; which, frankly, after decades of endless deceptions, is just obtuse.
I would say, if one’s perspective was of someone who was not taking care of dying people in understaffed hospitals that were so full with covid patients that people with heart attacks and injuries from car accidents couldn’t get care -- and I assure you, that was very real -- it makes sense that someone safely on the sidelines can crunch the numbers and say “0.1%? pfft bad flu” (although clearly it was worse than a bad flu. Since when were we loading the excess bodies into refrigerated cars during a bad flu season?; c’mon now).
There was and is a lot of minimization.
Now that death numbers really ARE down; now that we actually DO have some vaccines that do a little something, and we have some treatments that DO work to some extent; now that we’ve found ways to somewhat safely keep business and schools open (partly due to all the foregoing), it’s easy to say “see, dummies? We tolja all along it was not a big deal!”)
It was maybe not a big deal for healthy people who were not in the thick of it. But I assure you, it was a huge deal. I object to that kind of “I told you so” hindsight, because it always comes from people who were not dealing with the problem directly.
0.1% really is a bad flu, though. Excess mortality was comparable to many minor flu epidemics of the 21st century, which likewise primarily went after the elderly and infirm. It might seem callous, but then, never before in history have we destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions of young people in the name of a few extra months of life for those already at the life expectancy. There were many, many people who pointed this out at the very beginning, and they were viciously smeared, and many had their careers ruined. Given that everything since - higher suicide and drug OD rates, the collapsing economy, all without having had any effect whatsoever on the epidemiological progress of the virus - has unfolded exactly as they predicted, entitles them to quite a bit of "I told you so." In fact, jamming that "I told you so" down the throats of the pied pipers who led us down this primrose path to ruin may be the only way to ensure this never happens again. In that context, "we couldn't have known" is just a cope, a way for people to avoid saying "I was wrong".
As to treatments, we've had hydroxchloroquine and ivermectin from the start. They work. Simple as. Had the manipulators not engaged in every dishonest trick in the book, deaths would have been a lot lower. But then, they wouldn't have gotten the EUAs for the "vaccines" that "sort of" work, and think of all the hundreds of billions of lability-free revenues that would have been lost then.
And honestly, now that we're watching those "vaccines" fail in real time, with often rather horrific consequences due to their shocking side effect profiles, we're seeing "we couldn't have known" get dusted off again. Despite the fact that, once again, there were many voices warning about what we're seeing, right from the beginning.
There’s so much I disagree with in this assessment, but it’s stuff I’ve addressed in other places so I’m not prepared to go there today.
My perspective is that the public was mildly inconvenienced for a couple years, and for a good reason: to preserve a halfway functioning medical infrastructure for the good of all.
We’re just not used to sacrificing any convenience or pleasure in our culture; we’re not used to not getting our way 24/7, and so some temporary restrictions on going to restaurants and movies and school and office closures, while unpleasant and inconvenient, were perceived in some quarters as a cataclysmic disaster.
The young suffered, just as everyone else did, because this was a terrible historical event. The young’s lives weren’t destroyed by a couple years of hardship — in fact, if they were raised to be resilient at all, if they were raised to think of anyone other than themselves, they did just fine.
The goal wasn’t to “save a few worthless old people who were about to die anyway.” The goal wasn’t to trample on everyone’s precious freedoms. The goal was to preserve a functioning health care infrastructure during a disaster. I’ll just leave it at that.
Fascinating. You've started to grok the unreliability of the expert class, yet still cling to the narratives that were pushed in order to centralize wealth and control to a historically unprecedented degree, e.g. that a "disaster" threatened the health care system (no such disaster ever materialized; further, the models that predicted disaster, e.g. Ferguson's fabulism, were discredited as sloppy nonsense almost from the moment they came out). There's a direct line between attachment to those narratives, and the inability to see a way out. As long as you hold to those prejudices, you won't see solutions to the problems you identify.
I never said the elderly are "worthless". I said they were elderly. Old people die. Simple as. If that can be postponed, great. But if doing so comes at the expense of destroying the lives of the young by locking them inside, delaying their development, depriving them of a social life, and wrecking the economy they depend on for any hope of future prosperity, it's deeply immoral. The fact that we went along with that speaks to the moral vacuum of our social order.
"Jamming that "I told you so" down the throats of the pied pipers who led us down this primrose path to ruin may be the only way to ensure this never happens again."
100% agree. And it needs to happen immediately, because they are already doing the same thing with energy policy and climate change. Sri Lanka has given us an early warning of what can happen.
What, are you saying you don't want to be 'mildly inconvenienced' with rolling blackouts, a diet of soy and bugs, life in a pod, and an overall quality of life that a Roman slave would have regarded as inhumane? You don't think that would help to forestall the global supercatastrophe of average temperatures increasing by a fraction of a degree over the course of the next century? You right-wing monster.
This is how people radicalize. Unfortunately for this reason all these things are somehow "left-coded" so people figure this out and then move far-right.
I wouldn't expect the origins discussion to be brought up in the workplace context. It's terribly important, but it's a seprate (and much bigger?) question.
There's "Here's what we see happening around us. Here's how things might develop. Here's what you should do. We'll get back to you as things change and we know more."
And there's "How does society deal with the fact that we have the ability to create bioweapons? Especially given that we know how, somebody somewhere will probably do it?"
These questions seemed to work at odds with each other at the beginning of Covid when it felt like blame-it-on-China would send us way off task. (Especially since the truth was closer to blame-it on-us.)
But yes, our elites have shown themselves incompetent and dishonest, and that doesn't bode well.
Yes, the origin question was a separate question from how to deal with COVID. It should have been investigated immediately by the many government agencies tasked with national security and defense. It would not have been necessary to divert public health resources and attention away from their primary task.
“Finding the truth” is a more appropriate characterization than “blame China”. And yes, certainly there is plenty of blame to go around.