It will *always* be better to delay getting Covid because a treatment may always be right around the corner. But you sacrifice so much living while you wait. You need to be looking at the cost of another day lost to fear vs the benefit that another day will bring in treatment options. There’s no way that advocates for trying to delay infection at this point.
You’ve lost nearly 2 years of your life and it hasn’t brought the treatment you feel comfortable with. You’ve lost nearly 1 year vaccinated and even that didn’t make you comfortable getting it. You’re recently boosted (maximum antibody levels->maximum protection against severe disease) and still not comfortable getting Covid. At this point, every day you try to avoid getting Covid is only making you 1 day older, giving you 1 day lower antibody levels and costing you 1 day of normal, fear-free life. And it’s still not going to keep you from getting Covid.
This is what I'm talking about when I say that the rhetoric about COVID is extreme on both sides. From the right, the argument tends to this sort of irrational fatalism. But...
You really have no freaking clue how much Arnold, me, or anyone else is "sacrificing". If the changes to one's daily routine are quite minor, there's not much sacrifice at all, and there's very little fear.
And while it might always be better to delay, there's very likely diminishing returns. Delaying a few months until a good treatment is commonly available is a rational choice.
Simply put, everyone should drop the politically minded emotional extremism and adopt, rational expectations about their risks, and act accordingly.
Greatly reducing your social circle, hitting pause on hobbies – these seem like significant sacrifices to me. Of course it must be worth the trade-off for him. But it does seem like it's worth quantifying the risk, comparing it to other existing daily risks (granted that Covid is in addition to those risks) and really giving it thought.
Before the vaccine I knew of some people who died or were severely ill, but now, despite infection numbers going up, I know of nobody in my extended circle who has been severely ill. It seems to me that personal health risk assessment has a sort of stickiness. It's harder to update our priors than with other things.
The big problem I have is that the media is still excessively poor at explaining and quantifying the risks.
As best I can tell, even for a vaccinated person over 80, the death rate for COVID is something like 45.7 (per 100k). For people in their 70s it falls to about 12. The rates for people being hospitalized with a serious case of Covid are
To me, this is the kind of comparison people should be making. We consider driving a real but acceptably small risk of everyday life. How does COVID compare? Is it something we should shrug off, or something we should pay attention to.
Well, it depends on your age and your risk tolerance, but to me, if you're in an age group (or you interact with people in that age group) where the risk of debilitating COVID is like 5 times the risk of your everyday baseline odds of randomly dying, that's something I'd pay attention to.
The risk of driving a car that you propose as a benchmark needs to be adjusted for by "comorbidities." What are my chances of dying if I drive sober, during the day, and have a good driving record? My guess is that they much, much lower than the baseline chance.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but as far as a common denominator "background risk" sort of benchmark to refer to, it's the first thing that came to mind. If you live in an urban area and never drive very fast, the odds are super small.
Which kind of underscores that COVID is still a pretty substantial risk. :\
Agree this is the important conversation that's completely missing in the media and most discourse on the topic of COVID. Also wish there was more discussion about creative ways to protect the most vulnerable. The problem is that the most vulnerable people can only really control their risk of exposure to a limited extent.
A minor point: merely delaying getting COVID means you will be older when you get it, thus more vulnerable. Maybe if you got it for the first time at age 65 you would recover, but at age 70, it would be mortal.
"I just notice that in the worst weeks of the past two years, the number of people that I personally knew with COVID never exceeded more than one per week, and the number was typically zero. Now all of a sudden, I know a dozen. ... If you are not on the East Coast, you may not know what I’m talking about. Yet. But things are absolutely crazy here."
Same with me (also EC), except "one per month", but now, yes, about a dozen, including multiple teenagers, which I hadn't seen before in any of the previous 'waves'. Many more "I am positive" in the social media stream, and more "case alerts" at workplaces and schools. About half the positive folks I know well say they have no symptoms at all and were surprised by the positive result, and the others have mild symptoms that vary a lot: this one has stomach issues, that one headaches, another one fever and cough.
I can't exclude the possibility that people are just a lot more likely to self-test now, especially when encouraged to do so after some potential exposure, but I think the increase in numbers is real.
On the other hand, "with this new variant, even with vaccine boosters, there's little we can do to stop everybody from getting a mild case in a wave that will probably burn itself out quick" may be just the kind of lucky 'exogeneous shock' we need for a reset of social psychology to allow people to suddenly accept endemic seasonality of what is now a tolerably mild virus for which we also now have effective treatments like the antiviral drugs about to be approved by the FDA any day now ... maybe ... we hope.
I'm guessing that people in your circle act differently than people in mine.
My circle is, alas, farther along the road to perdition in terms of conditioning moral judgments on whether one is one of the 'good people' doing 'good things', or not. If you are, you get sympathy and 'a pass'. If you're not, you get shaming and the rest of the business. This kind of pervasive moral-tribalism is effectively a reification of the rejection of the very possibility of a Good Samaritan, of the notion that deciding whether an act was 'Good' was something independent of the question of whether the actor was or was not a Samaritan.
One potentially beneficial implication of that, however, is so much built-in flexibility to shift to almost any arbitrary position that the "Pandemic Mentality Reset" can happen in the blink of an eye. And, while you'll probably scoff at this or think I'm joking, I'm 100% serious in saying I wouldn't be surprised at all if getting infected suddenly became *cool*.
For all I know, it may have already happened, but being who I am, I have pretty much the opposite of my finger on the pulse of the latest hotness. But coolness as a possibility is especially the case now the expected risks are much lower, and many more younger people are getting positive test results. We should definitely hope for that, because what happens for any cool fads is that they run out of steam quick with too much down-market mimicry, and then the cool people abandon it and move on to the next thing, which would help us all get back to normal quicker.
In the meantime, lots of cool people will be getting infected, because cool people are meeting up with other cool people all the time, and then they'll be attention-whoring on social media, fishing for sympathy, telling their stories about their experiences etc. "Yeah, I was vaccinated, but got the Omicron anyway." - "Oh really?! What was that like?"
But getting back to perdition - remember how it was suddenly ok to have big and crowded gatherings with lots of unmasked people, but only in the case of those being BLM protests? Or how parties are no good in general, but then suddenly ones with "sophisticated, vaccinated crowds" are fine? In moral philosophy, the danger of public ethics degenerating into this kind of "there's always some excuse for friends" mess is one of the classic arguments for hard-rules deontology.
So, in my circle, if one gets infected or a positive test result, whether one is perceived as being shame-worthy and stained with moral culpability on the one hand, or gets sympathy and 'a pass' on the other, depends strongly on one's vaccination status and also the general regard for or prestige of the voluntary choices one made that likely led to infection.
So, if you are unvaccinated, if you get sick, you "got what you deserved" and "had it coming", and if you die, still no, "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" and instead it's, "Herman Cain Award!"
If you do not get sick, but you are the kind of person who doesn't wear masks, doesn't socially isolate, and continues going to crowded get-togethers and venues with lots of other pandemic-insouciant folks, then you should be ashamed of yourself for "killing grandma" (not nearly as common as it used to be but still around) and "putting the rest of us in danger", and sometimes even "keeping the pandemic going".
On the other hand, if one is vaccinated up to the legal limit, then one makes it to the next step in the condemnation-offramp flowchart. "Were you socially isolating?" Yes: "Aw, that's terrible! Not your fault, it's those anti-vaxxers who are to blame!"
If you were in fact doing lots of face-to-face activity, then, "Was it directly - or intended to be in furtherance of - the kind of activity our team favors?" (Example, fundraising event for something our team likes) Yes: you're fine, and "Poor baby, get well soon, I'll send you an edible arrangement."
On the other foot, if you are, say, a politician for the other team, or the CEO for a company that does things our team disfavors, and you probably got your breakthrough case because of all those meetings and all that jet-setting, well, again, it's your own damn fault, and "Hope you wind up in the ICU!"
Really appreciate Zvi's Covid coverage, but I wish his expertise was more legible to the public. It's awkward when friends ask me to explain my source and I find myself saying “Well, he’s really good at Magic: The Gathering...”
I’m really fed up with covid. We traveled to Boston for my wife’s family (not seen in two years), and this whole place is messed up. They won’t even let you go to Mass without a mask. Everything is weird.
We have Christmas with my wife’s grandmother. She is 98, in severe dementia, and likely to die soon anyway. They want to give everyone rapid covid tests before Christmas. Honestly, everyone is triple vaxxed. And if you got it and died, is life worth living at this point. Great grandma can’t remember 5 minutes ago and doctors say she will be dead in months anyway. This is the last Christmas to see her great grandkids. If they have covid, fuck it. Let her have one Christmas with her great grandkids. If there is a 1% chance she does one month earlier, is that so bad. She keeps saying she wants to kill herself. I’m not sure many of the years at the end of life are high QALY. Especially if you stop living.
Life is a series of todays. If you keep putting off today…evidentially you are just dead. Live each day.
A couple months ago I began reading Freddie - instead of buying his book, The Cult of Smart. I keep looking for an honest Liberal, or Leftist, and he seems honest about writing what he believes is the truth. Including his own silly Marxism, tho like Marx with good critiques. His literate prose is a pleasure to read, only slightly verbose (less than Rod Dreher, or Scott Alexander; or A. Sullivan or M. Yglesias )
He is calling out his left fellows for hypocrisy in going after upper class moral superiority.
" if denial of human pleasures is virtuous, I can be more virtuous than my peers. If caution is noble, overcaution must be even nobler."
He also recently had a great note about trusting Harvard, seen in his title:
>> at the end of this process, no matter how you change it, no matter how many statements the schools put out about diversity, no matter how many thumbs you put on all the scales to select for a certain kind of student, at the end of this process are self-serving institutions of limitless greed and an army of apparatchiks who are employed only to protect their interests. That’s it. You can’t make college admissions fair by getting rid of the SAT because colleges admissions can’t be “fair.” <<
It's really important to note that neither college admissions, nor life, nor Covid, are "fair" - and they can't be made "fair". Moral superiority positioning now involves some form of denying or opposing some particular unfairness, and often mislabeling it as injustice.
In this Covid "worry porn" article cited by Arnold, Freddie talks about ... elite emotions based on competition:
"our striving class is made up of people who are raised to compete and who structure their emotional lives around competing with each other. "
This fits with John McWhorter's idea of Woke as a religion, and these Woke fundamentalists as competing for moral purity.
Freddie's next note, in a reply to lefty critics, asks, what do the Woke folk want him to DO?:
"You’re talking about this as a matter of individual choice, but we have a responsibility to the community!"
Near the end of this post he concludes:
>> Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s book The Sum of Small Things lays out the essential psychology brilliantly. As she demonstrates, changing norms among bourgie liberals has made conspicuous consumption crass, declassee. But the urge to compete, to win, trumps all. So our striving castes have developed all manner of other signals through which they subtly assert their superior virtue, their superior lives. Covid now fills such a role. With Covid, you never need an excuse to assert your superior seriousness, never need to wait for the right moment to insist that you’re doing it better than all of your peers. You can just openly tell the world “I am more responsible than you,”<<
I hate that bullshit, but I've never been on the left. Freddie IS on the left, but also hates and calls out the hypocritical claims of moral superiority - which are also part of leftist BLM, and climate alarmism, and even anti-capitalism (the axis Freddie remains on-board with).
He's on tract to make $200k this year with substack - and most of his posts are free. Most transparent pundit I've read (is Scott A better?)
Nice comment. For a long time I avoided Freddie because he's an avowed marxist. However, after Arnold listed him ( thanks for him and all the other links) I took a chance and read a few posts. I found him to be refreshing, a leftist that's a straight shooter. I wish there were more writers like him, both left, right and any other places on Arnold's three axises.
I think this is the right strategy. My wife and kids are all at relatively low risk, buy I often see my elderly parents, whose chance of getting seriously ill even with all three shots is non-trivial. The omicron strain seems more highly contagious than the priors, so I'm going to be cautious.
To me, cautious means living life pretty much as normal (going to stores or out to eat or maybe to the movies), but wearing a mask and getting tested before I see my parents. My teenagers go out with their friends. I live in some fear of another lockdown, that would really suck.
What DeBoer is describing is accurate of a lot of people, I think. Whereas I just make my decision about what I should be doing, many people can't help but to tell everyone else what decisions they should be making too. Especially if that decision comes with the backing of some "authoritative" source. Their decisions are based on and become inserted into the public discourse.
Which, of course, means it's dumbed down to the point where anyone can understand it. Thus, having a conversation more nuanced than "Vaccine good!" or "vaccine bad!" will get you downvoted or tuned out of most discussions. This has happened to me a couple times, from both the left and the right.
The right doesn't want to anyone to suggest anything, for fear that it becomes mandatory. The left wants to blame everything on the unvaccinated, even when the data shows that for some populations, COVID is still quite dangerous for the vaccinated. It's weird.
"The right doesn't want to anyone to suggest *anything*, for fear that it becomes mandatory."
How many of these on "the right" don't want to anyone to suggest anything"? 5%, or 1%?
Was the Great Barrington Declaration a suggestion of *nothing'?
"The left wants to blame everything on the unvaccinated, even when the data shows that for some populations, COVID is still quite dangerous for the vaccinated. It's weird."
It's not weird, it's the Woke Left showing their true totalitarian colors.
To them, everything bad is always the fault of (only) those who refuse to toe their Party Line.
It will *always* be better to delay getting Covid because a treatment may always be right around the corner. But you sacrifice so much living while you wait. You need to be looking at the cost of another day lost to fear vs the benefit that another day will bring in treatment options. There’s no way that advocates for trying to delay infection at this point.
You’ve lost nearly 2 years of your life and it hasn’t brought the treatment you feel comfortable with. You’ve lost nearly 1 year vaccinated and even that didn’t make you comfortable getting it. You’re recently boosted (maximum antibody levels->maximum protection against severe disease) and still not comfortable getting Covid. At this point, every day you try to avoid getting Covid is only making you 1 day older, giving you 1 day lower antibody levels and costing you 1 day of normal, fear-free life. And it’s still not going to keep you from getting Covid.
This is what I'm talking about when I say that the rhetoric about COVID is extreme on both sides. From the right, the argument tends to this sort of irrational fatalism. But...
You really have no freaking clue how much Arnold, me, or anyone else is "sacrificing". If the changes to one's daily routine are quite minor, there's not much sacrifice at all, and there's very little fear.
And while it might always be better to delay, there's very likely diminishing returns. Delaying a few months until a good treatment is commonly available is a rational choice.
Simply put, everyone should drop the politically minded emotional extremism and adopt, rational expectations about their risks, and act accordingly.
Greatly reducing your social circle, hitting pause on hobbies – these seem like significant sacrifices to me. Of course it must be worth the trade-off for him. But it does seem like it's worth quantifying the risk, comparing it to other existing daily risks (granted that Covid is in addition to those risks) and really giving it thought.
Before the vaccine I knew of some people who died or were severely ill, but now, despite infection numbers going up, I know of nobody in my extended circle who has been severely ill. It seems to me that personal health risk assessment has a sort of stickiness. It's harder to update our priors than with other things.
The big problem I have is that the media is still excessively poor at explaining and quantifying the risks.
As best I can tell, even for a vaccinated person over 80, the death rate for COVID is something like 45.7 (per 100k). For people in their 70s it falls to about 12. The rates for people being hospitalized with a serious case of Covid are
60s-> 12.8
70s-> 25.3
80s-> 53.4
(https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1027511/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-42.pdf)
For comparison, the baseline chance of dying in a car accident in the US is something like 11.9.
(https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/data-details/)
To me, this is the kind of comparison people should be making. We consider driving a real but acceptably small risk of everyday life. How does COVID compare? Is it something we should shrug off, or something we should pay attention to.
Well, it depends on your age and your risk tolerance, but to me, if you're in an age group (or you interact with people in that age group) where the risk of debilitating COVID is like 5 times the risk of your everyday baseline odds of randomly dying, that's something I'd pay attention to.
The risk of driving a car that you propose as a benchmark needs to be adjusted for by "comorbidities." What are my chances of dying if I drive sober, during the day, and have a good driving record? My guess is that they much, much lower than the baseline chance.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but as far as a common denominator "background risk" sort of benchmark to refer to, it's the first thing that came to mind. If you live in an urban area and never drive very fast, the odds are super small.
Which kind of underscores that COVID is still a pretty substantial risk. :\
Agree this is the important conversation that's completely missing in the media and most discourse on the topic of COVID. Also wish there was more discussion about creative ways to protect the most vulnerable. The problem is that the most vulnerable people can only really control their risk of exposure to a limited extent.
A minor point: merely delaying getting COVID means you will be older when you get it, thus more vulnerable. Maybe if you got it for the first time at age 65 you would recover, but at age 70, it would be mortal.
"I just notice that in the worst weeks of the past two years, the number of people that I personally knew with COVID never exceeded more than one per week, and the number was typically zero. Now all of a sudden, I know a dozen. ... If you are not on the East Coast, you may not know what I’m talking about. Yet. But things are absolutely crazy here."
Same with me (also EC), except "one per month", but now, yes, about a dozen, including multiple teenagers, which I hadn't seen before in any of the previous 'waves'. Many more "I am positive" in the social media stream, and more "case alerts" at workplaces and schools. About half the positive folks I know well say they have no symptoms at all and were surprised by the positive result, and the others have mild symptoms that vary a lot: this one has stomach issues, that one headaches, another one fever and cough.
I can't exclude the possibility that people are just a lot more likely to self-test now, especially when encouraged to do so after some potential exposure, but I think the increase in numbers is real.
On the other hand, "with this new variant, even with vaccine boosters, there's little we can do to stop everybody from getting a mild case in a wave that will probably burn itself out quick" may be just the kind of lucky 'exogeneous shock' we need for a reset of social psychology to allow people to suddenly accept endemic seasonality of what is now a tolerably mild virus for which we also now have effective treatments like the antiviral drugs about to be approved by the FDA any day now ... maybe ... we hope.
And will this reset the social psychology so that people do not shame and "other" the people who get the virus.
I'm guessing that people in your circle act differently than people in mine.
My circle is, alas, farther along the road to perdition in terms of conditioning moral judgments on whether one is one of the 'good people' doing 'good things', or not. If you are, you get sympathy and 'a pass'. If you're not, you get shaming and the rest of the business. This kind of pervasive moral-tribalism is effectively a reification of the rejection of the very possibility of a Good Samaritan, of the notion that deciding whether an act was 'Good' was something independent of the question of whether the actor was or was not a Samaritan.
One potentially beneficial implication of that, however, is so much built-in flexibility to shift to almost any arbitrary position that the "Pandemic Mentality Reset" can happen in the blink of an eye. And, while you'll probably scoff at this or think I'm joking, I'm 100% serious in saying I wouldn't be surprised at all if getting infected suddenly became *cool*.
For all I know, it may have already happened, but being who I am, I have pretty much the opposite of my finger on the pulse of the latest hotness. But coolness as a possibility is especially the case now the expected risks are much lower, and many more younger people are getting positive test results. We should definitely hope for that, because what happens for any cool fads is that they run out of steam quick with too much down-market mimicry, and then the cool people abandon it and move on to the next thing, which would help us all get back to normal quicker.
In the meantime, lots of cool people will be getting infected, because cool people are meeting up with other cool people all the time, and then they'll be attention-whoring on social media, fishing for sympathy, telling their stories about their experiences etc. "Yeah, I was vaccinated, but got the Omicron anyway." - "Oh really?! What was that like?"
But getting back to perdition - remember how it was suddenly ok to have big and crowded gatherings with lots of unmasked people, but only in the case of those being BLM protests? Or how parties are no good in general, but then suddenly ones with "sophisticated, vaccinated crowds" are fine? In moral philosophy, the danger of public ethics degenerating into this kind of "there's always some excuse for friends" mess is one of the classic arguments for hard-rules deontology.
So, in my circle, if one gets infected or a positive test result, whether one is perceived as being shame-worthy and stained with moral culpability on the one hand, or gets sympathy and 'a pass' on the other, depends strongly on one's vaccination status and also the general regard for or prestige of the voluntary choices one made that likely led to infection.
So, if you are unvaccinated, if you get sick, you "got what you deserved" and "had it coming", and if you die, still no, "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" and instead it's, "Herman Cain Award!"
If you do not get sick, but you are the kind of person who doesn't wear masks, doesn't socially isolate, and continues going to crowded get-togethers and venues with lots of other pandemic-insouciant folks, then you should be ashamed of yourself for "killing grandma" (not nearly as common as it used to be but still around) and "putting the rest of us in danger", and sometimes even "keeping the pandemic going".
On the other hand, if one is vaccinated up to the legal limit, then one makes it to the next step in the condemnation-offramp flowchart. "Were you socially isolating?" Yes: "Aw, that's terrible! Not your fault, it's those anti-vaxxers who are to blame!"
If you were in fact doing lots of face-to-face activity, then, "Was it directly - or intended to be in furtherance of - the kind of activity our team favors?" (Example, fundraising event for something our team likes) Yes: you're fine, and "Poor baby, get well soon, I'll send you an edible arrangement."
On the other foot, if you are, say, a politician for the other team, or the CEO for a company that does things our team disfavors, and you probably got your breakthrough case because of all those meetings and all that jet-setting, well, again, it's your own damn fault, and "Hope you wind up in the ICU!"
Really appreciate Zvi's Covid coverage, but I wish his expertise was more legible to the public. It's awkward when friends ask me to explain my source and I find myself saying “Well, he’s really good at Magic: The Gathering...”
I think your fear is based on your age.
I’m really fed up with covid. We traveled to Boston for my wife’s family (not seen in two years), and this whole place is messed up. They won’t even let you go to Mass without a mask. Everything is weird.
We have Christmas with my wife’s grandmother. She is 98, in severe dementia, and likely to die soon anyway. They want to give everyone rapid covid tests before Christmas. Honestly, everyone is triple vaxxed. And if you got it and died, is life worth living at this point. Great grandma can’t remember 5 minutes ago and doctors say she will be dead in months anyway. This is the last Christmas to see her great grandkids. If they have covid, fuck it. Let her have one Christmas with her great grandkids. If there is a 1% chance she does one month earlier, is that so bad. She keeps saying she wants to kill herself. I’m not sure many of the years at the end of life are high QALY. Especially if you stop living.
Life is a series of todays. If you keep putting off today…evidentially you are just dead. Live each day.
A couple months ago I began reading Freddie - instead of buying his book, The Cult of Smart. I keep looking for an honest Liberal, or Leftist, and he seems honest about writing what he believes is the truth. Including his own silly Marxism, tho like Marx with good critiques. His literate prose is a pleasure to read, only slightly verbose (less than Rod Dreher, or Scott Alexander; or A. Sullivan or M. Yglesias )
He is calling out his left fellows for hypocrisy in going after upper class moral superiority.
" if denial of human pleasures is virtuous, I can be more virtuous than my peers. If caution is noble, overcaution must be even nobler."
He also recently had a great note about trusting Harvard, seen in his title:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard
>> at the end of this process, no matter how you change it, no matter how many statements the schools put out about diversity, no matter how many thumbs you put on all the scales to select for a certain kind of student, at the end of this process are self-serving institutions of limitless greed and an army of apparatchiks who are employed only to protect their interests. That’s it. You can’t make college admissions fair by getting rid of the SAT because colleges admissions can’t be “fair.” <<
It's really important to note that neither college admissions, nor life, nor Covid, are "fair" - and they can't be made "fair". Moral superiority positioning now involves some form of denying or opposing some particular unfairness, and often mislabeling it as injustice.
In this Covid "worry porn" article cited by Arnold, Freddie talks about ... elite emotions based on competition:
"our striving class is made up of people who are raised to compete and who structure their emotional lives around competing with each other. "
This fits with John McWhorter's idea of Woke as a religion, and these Woke fundamentalists as competing for moral purity.
Freddie's next note, in a reply to lefty critics, asks, what do the Woke folk want him to DO?:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/social-responsibility-to-do-what
"You’re talking about this as a matter of individual choice, but we have a responsibility to the community!"
Near the end of this post he concludes:
>> Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s book The Sum of Small Things lays out the essential psychology brilliantly. As she demonstrates, changing norms among bourgie liberals has made conspicuous consumption crass, declassee. But the urge to compete, to win, trumps all. So our striving castes have developed all manner of other signals through which they subtly assert their superior virtue, their superior lives. Covid now fills such a role. With Covid, you never need an excuse to assert your superior seriousness, never need to wait for the right moment to insist that you’re doing it better than all of your peers. You can just openly tell the world “I am more responsible than you,”<<
I hate that bullshit, but I've never been on the left. Freddie IS on the left, but also hates and calls out the hypocritical claims of moral superiority - which are also part of leftist BLM, and climate alarmism, and even anti-capitalism (the axis Freddie remains on-board with).
He's on tract to make $200k this year with substack - and most of his posts are free. Most transparent pundit I've read (is Scott A better?)
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/state-of-the-newsletter-december
Nice comment. For a long time I avoided Freddie because he's an avowed marxist. However, after Arnold listed him ( thanks for him and all the other links) I took a chance and read a few posts. I found him to be refreshing, a leftist that's a straight shooter. I wish there were more writers like him, both left, right and any other places on Arnold's three axises.
I think this is the right strategy. My wife and kids are all at relatively low risk, buy I often see my elderly parents, whose chance of getting seriously ill even with all three shots is non-trivial. The omicron strain seems more highly contagious than the priors, so I'm going to be cautious.
To me, cautious means living life pretty much as normal (going to stores or out to eat or maybe to the movies), but wearing a mask and getting tested before I see my parents. My teenagers go out with their friends. I live in some fear of another lockdown, that would really suck.
What DeBoer is describing is accurate of a lot of people, I think. Whereas I just make my decision about what I should be doing, many people can't help but to tell everyone else what decisions they should be making too. Especially if that decision comes with the backing of some "authoritative" source. Their decisions are based on and become inserted into the public discourse.
Which, of course, means it's dumbed down to the point where anyone can understand it. Thus, having a conversation more nuanced than "Vaccine good!" or "vaccine bad!" will get you downvoted or tuned out of most discussions. This has happened to me a couple times, from both the left and the right.
The right doesn't want to anyone to suggest anything, for fear that it becomes mandatory. The left wants to blame everything on the unvaccinated, even when the data shows that for some populations, COVID is still quite dangerous for the vaccinated. It's weird.
"The right doesn't want to anyone to suggest *anything*, for fear that it becomes mandatory."
How many of these on "the right" don't want to anyone to suggest anything"? 5%, or 1%?
Was the Great Barrington Declaration a suggestion of *nothing'?
"The left wants to blame everything on the unvaccinated, even when the data shows that for some populations, COVID is still quite dangerous for the vaccinated. It's weird."
It's not weird, it's the Woke Left showing their true totalitarian colors.
To them, everything bad is always the fault of (only) those who refuse to toe their Party Line.
In a world of Joey Gallo 'epidemiologist experts' batting .199, Trea Turner Zvi at .328 is a superstar.