The Pandemic Is Resetting Casual Friendships - The Atlantic - "Casual friends and acquaintances can be as important to well-being as family, romantic partners, and your closest friends. In his initial study, for example, he found that the majority of people who got new jobs through social connections did so through people on the periphery of their lives, not close relations... losing the incidental, repeated social interactions that physical workplaces foster can make it especially difficult for young people and new hires to establish themselves within the complex social hierarchy of a workplace. Losing them can make it harder to progress in work as a whole, access development opportunities, and be recognized for your contributions. (After all, no one can see you or what you’re doing.) These kinds of setbacks early in professional life can be especially devastating, because the losses tend to compound—fall behind right out of the gate, and you’re more likely to stay there. The loss of these interactions can make the day-to-day realities of work more frustrating, too, and can fray previously pleasant relationships. In a recent study, Andrew Guydish, a doctoral candidate in psychology at UC Santa Cruz, looked at the effects of what he calls conversational reciprocity—how much each participant in a conversation talks while one is directing the other to complete a task. He found that in these situations—which often crop up between managers and employees at work—pairs of people tended to use unstructured time, if it were available, to balance the interaction. When that happened, both people reported feeling happier and more satisfied afterward... Strip out the humanity, and there’s nothing but the transaction left. The psychological effects of losing all but our closest ties can be profound. Peripheral connections tether us to the world at large; without them, people sink into the compounding sameness of closed networks... The loss of these interactions may be one reason for the growth in internet conspiracy theories in the past year, and especially for the surge in groups like QAnon. But while online communities of all kinds can deliver some of the psychological benefits of meeting new people and making friends in the real world, the echo chamber of conspiracism is a further source of isolation. “There’s a lot of research showing that when you talk only to people who are like you, it actually makes your opinions shift even further away from other groups,” Sandstrom explained. “That’s how cults work. That’s how terrorist groups work.”... social isolation increases the risk of premature death from any cause by almost 30 percent."
How the Public-Health Messaging Backfired - The Atlantic - "Throughout the past year, traditional and social media have been caught up in a cycle of shaming—made worse by being so unscientific and misguided. How dare you go to the beach? newspapers have scolded us for months, despite lacking evidence that this posed any significant threat to public health. It wasn’t just talk: Many cities closed parks and outdoor recreational spaces, even as they kept open indoor dining and gyms. Just this month, UC Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst both banned students from taking even solitary walks outdoors... On social media, meanwhile, pictures of people outdoors without masks draw reprimands, insults, and confident predictions of super-spreading—and yet few note when super-spreading fails to follow. While visible but low-risk activities attract the scolds, other actual risks—in workplaces and crowded households, exacerbated by the lack of testing or paid sick leave—are not as easily accessible to photographers. Stefan Baral, an associate epidemiology professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that it’s almost as if we’ve “designed a public-health response most suitable for higher-income” groups and the “Twitter generation”—stay home; have your groceries delivered; focus on the behaviors you can photograph and shame online—rather than provide the support and conditions necessary for more people to keep themselves safe. And the viral videos shaming people for failing to take sensible precautions, such as wearing masks indoors, do not necessarily help. For one thing, fretting over the occasional person throwing a tantrum while going unmasked in a supermarket distorts the reality: Most of the public has been complying with mask wearing. Worse, shaming is often an ineffective way of getting people to change their behavior, and it entrenches polarization and discourages disclosure, making it harder to fight the virus... Amidst all the mistrust and the scolding, a crucial public-health concept fell by the wayside. Harm reduction... Another problem with absolutism is the “abstinence violation” effect, Joshua Barocas, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine and Infectious Diseases, told me. When we set perfection as the only option, it can cause people who fall short of that standard in one small, particular way to decide that they’ve already failed, and might as well give up entirely. Most people who have attempted a diet or a new exercise regimen are familiar with this psychological state. The better approach is encouraging risk reduction and layered mitigation—emphasizing that every little bit helps—while also recognizing that a risk-free life is neither possible nor desirable. Socializing is not a luxury—kids need to play with one another, and adults need to interact... Socializing is perhaps the most important predictor of health and longevity, after not smoking and perhaps exercise and a healthy diet"
From 2021. When political and media incentives aligned to fan covid hysteria
Bill Maher calls for COVID Commission: The 'powers that be' refuse to admit they 'got it wrong' - ""Real Time" host Bill Maher closed his show Friday night by calling for a "COVID Commission" to investigate how the country mishandled the pandemic. "I get it that we didn't know exactly what was happening at the beginning of COVID, and some mistakes were inevitable," Maher told his audience. "But four years on, I'm tired of hearing, 'Well, we didn't know.' No, we didn't. But some people guessed better than others. And the people who got it wrong don't seem to want to acknowledge that now." "Some people said closing schools for so long was pointless and would cause much worse collateral damage to kids, and they were right," Maher said. Maher took aim at The Daily Beast for a hit piece it ran on him in 2021 for considering the lab-leak theory, running the headline "Bill Maher pushes Steve Bannon Wuhan lab conspiracy theory," something he noted was "typical of the mainstream media at the time." "Of course, it wasn't a conspiracy theory, and it wasn't owned by Steve Bannon. And now everyone, including the Biden administration, admits there's at least a 50-50 chance that the virus could have begun in the lab in Wuhan that was doing gain-of-function research on that virus, duh! But I don't see a lot of retractions being printed," Maher said. The HBO host blasted the claim years back that natural immunity was inferior to the COVID vaccine and listed several COVID-era overreactions like washing the mail and wearing masks outdoors. "Because the last thing you would want to do when a disease is afoot is get fresh air and sunshine and vitamin D," Maher sarcastically said. "No, much better to stay locked up, stressed out and day drinking." "Yes, some very bad ideas were embraced as the conventional wisdom, ideas that haven't aged well. And a lot of its dissenting opinions that were suppressed and ridiculed at the time have proven to be correct," Maher said. "Maybe that's why the powers that be never wanted a COVID commission. Why not? We love commissions! The Warren Commission, the AIDS Commission, 911 Commission. The NFL even had an 'Is ramming your head into another guy's head bad for heads?' Commission."... "But if there's been a big national to retrofit buildings, I missed it. Gain of function research is still going on in labs. We're still torturing animals by raising our food in conditions ideal for viruses to make the leap to humans… We handed out $4 trillion dollars of free money, 280 billion of which was just flat-out stolen in what the AP called ‘the greatest grift in US history’ and which started an inflationary spiral that we now blame on Biden. So we're gonna bring back Trump?! The guy who ignored COVID like it was the dinner check?!""
Why the left hate him so much nowadays
🇺🇸Travis🇺🇸 on X - "SHOCKING: In new documents obtained by Senator Rand Paul, the entire COVID wuhan story is exposed. A group called DEFUSE went to several government agencies to receive funding to engineer a virus in Wuhan similar to Covid, and Fauci’s lab in Montana was listed as a partner. This happened in 2018 before Covid was released. 15 different federal agencies knew about this and not a single one of them have come forward and exposed this. Senator Paul has had to fight for years to get these documents released. Why was a group working on a coronavirus in 2018? How did an almost identical virus just happen to leak from Wuhan? Why did Fauci hide this information, and why was he using government funding to pay for this? Did the US government release a virus onto its on citizens and globally just to win an election and gain more power?"
Leana Wen, M.D. on X - "For those who don’t agree that the vaccinated can return to pre-pandemic normal, I ask: What should we all do? Perpetual masking? Forever not dining out, avoiding large weddings & indoor gatherings, etc? Virtually everything has risk, and zero covid is not a viable strategy."
From Mar 2022. The replies are a good illustration of covid hysteria. Left wingers didn't want the pandemic to end (some of them are still pushing covid hysteria to this day)
David French on X - "One of the worst aspects of the new right is its "no apologies" ethos. That's not just unchristian, it's fundamentally anti-Christian. We all fall. We all make mistakes. Repentance isn't optional. It's a necessary part of life."
Seth Dillon on X - "Remember when you sanctimoniously shamed anyone who opposed mask mandates? You said we didn't love our neighbors. You said we had blood on our hands. You tried to guilt us into compliance with anti-scientific groupthink so you could score virtue points on the internet. And you've never apologized."
Bushwackerbob on X - "I totally agree. Funny how libs suddenly find God when it is convenient for them. I was pro vaccine, but I was disgusted by the toxic discourse of pro vaxers when folks would not conform to the pro vaxer mob. The vaxer crowd was downright cruel at times."
Ekstra Bladet: Danish newspaper apologises for not questioning Covid-19 case numbers - "In an article in the Ekstra Bladet tabloid last week headlined “We Failed”, journalist Brian Weichardt issued a mea culpa to the public on behalf of the media for not doing more to interrogate Covid-19 statistics. Weichardt wrote that for nearly two years, both the press and the public had been “almost hypnotically preoccupied” with authorities’ daily coronavirus updates, obsessing over infections, hospitalisations and deaths, as the significance of the “smallest movements” was “laid out by experts, politicians and authorities, who have constantly warned us about the dormant corona monster under our beds”. “The constant mental alertness has worn out tremendously on all of us,” he wrote. “That is why we – the press – must also take stock of our own efforts. And we have failed.” He said the press had not been “vigilant enough” in questioning authorities about whether people were hospitalised “with corona and not because of corona”. “Because it makes a difference,” he wrote... NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard revealed to The Daily Telegraph earlier this month that up to half of cases being classified as Covid-19 hospitalisations “are actually people with other reasons for admission”, including broken bones, labour pains and even mental health issues... Late last year, White House chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci also stressed the distinction... In Canada, Ontario chief medical officer Dr Kieran Moore made nearly identical comments... The comments frustrated some critics of the Biden administration, who have been asking about the distinction for some time. “A shatteringly bad outing outside of the protected zone of friendly cable TV nets,” conservative polling group Rasmussen Reports wrote on Twitter."
From 2022. If only more media outlets had the honesty and integrity to do so. Even in 2022 there were still covid hystericists denouncing as "covid deniers" those who point out that those hospitalised with covid were not the same as those hospitalised for covid, even though multiple governments had admitted that. Presumably they're still singing that same tune
The death of Europe - "Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalise those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication. In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already. Police in Rotterdam opened fire on people protesting against Covid restrictions. Three were seriously injured. Austrian cops have wielded batons and shields against the thousands who took to the streets of Vienna to say no to mandatory vaxxing. In Brussels, the black, bureaucratic heart of the EU project, water cannons and tear gas were unleashed upon citizens agitating against vaccine passes. The irony is almost too much: in the European quarter of Brussels, the very part of Europe in which the modern European sensibility was forged by politicians, experts and technocrats, ordinary people make a blow for freedom and the forces of this supposedly liberal new continent beat them down. Rarely has modern Europe’s bluster about ‘human rights’ and ‘respect’ been so savagely exposed... outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel says mandatory vaxxing is likely to be introduced early next year. Ursula von der Leyen seems to think that every EU member state should force vaccination upon its citizens... Even the vaxxed will not be truly free people in this world. Rather, we will be the beneficiaries of state favour, the enjoyers of small privileges, in return for our agreeing to receive an injection. We will have a license from on high to go about our daily lives. And we will know that that license could swiftly be revoked if we refuse medical treatment in the future. The redefinition of ‘freedom’, the making of liberty contingent upon submission to medicine, will throttle the rights of all of us – vaxxed and unvaxxed alike. Strikingly, there is very little pushback from the so-called human-rights lobby against the proposed new regime of forced medication. Europhiles in the UK and elsewhere – the kind of people who assured us the EU was the great modern defender of the dignity of the individual – are meek as mice in the face of these state threats to strongarm citizens into medical compliance. It wasn’t meant to be like this, you see. It was Brexit Britain, they said, that would become a hotbed of deranged authoritarianism, while the EU would hold a candle for the modern principles of rights and respect. And now that the opposite has proven to be the case, they look the other way, or they subtly give their nod to what amounts to a tyranny of the state over the souls and flesh of individual human beings. European liberalism is dying, the European Union stands exposed as a seat of extreme authoritarianism, and the future of this continent looks very uncertain indeed. Covid will look like a blip in the affairs of man in comparison with the fallout from this political and moral crisis of the European continent."
From December 2021. This doesn't stop vaxholes pretending that no one was forced to get vaccinated (of course, some of them also complain that "forcing people to work" because they don't get enough free money is fascist, and most of them invoke bodily autonomy to push for unlimited abortion on demand at any point during a pregnancy)
Meme - Grey Matter Podcast @GreyMatterConvo: "The law firm that represents Canada Post in the vaccine mandate lawsuit brought against it by workers put out of work for refusing to take the jab, just hired the Justice Minister who imposed the mandates and unconstitutionally invoked the Emergencies Act. Do you see a problem?"
FASKEN @faskenlaw: "Honored to welcome Mr. David Lametti, former Justice Minister and Attorney General of Canada to Fasken as Counsel. A dedicated advocate for Indigenous reconciliation, he's also deeply engaged in emerging technology, particularly artificial intelligence."
The Virus Has Killed the Liberal Order - "wars and epidemics throw us back on our most basic hunter-gatherer instincts. We become more inward-looking, more tribal, more collectivist, more hierarchical. To put it another way, major disruptions of this kind remind us of how unnatural the liberal order is, and how fragile and contingent the individualism and prosperity of the past two centuries has been. “Free trade, the greatest blessing a government can bestow on a people, is in almost every country unpopular”, wrote Lord Macaulay in 1824. Since then, average global incomes have risen, at a conservative estimate, by 3,000 per cent – having previously barely sloped upwards at all. Globalisation and open markets have been miraculous poverty-busters. Take any measure you like: literacy, longevity, infant mortality, female education, calorie intake, height. Yet, in thrall to our Palaeolithic instincts, we still refuse to accept it. We deny the evidence of rising prosperity; or else we tell ourselves that rising living standards come at a terrible cost, that society has become soulless and materialistic, that something is missing. Every protest movement against the modern liberal order – romanticism, existentialism, fascism, communism, religious fundamentalism – is a tortured cry from our inner caveman, yearning for the collectivism and authority of the kin-group. As we haul ourselves from the pupa of lockdown, we find we are subtly transformed. There is more demand for authoritarian governments of both Left and Right. There is more protectionism, and thus more poverty. There is less tolerance of dissent. There is more identity politics – the ultimate form of collectivism, because it defines people, not as individuals, but by group."
Should You Swab Your Throat Plus Your Nose for COVID? | Scientific American
When you're still playing this game in 2024
COVID, Quickly, Episode 5: Vaccine Safety in Pregnancy, Blood Clots and Long-Haul Realities | Scientific American - "The patients were all in the Veterans Administration health system, so they have detailed records. Compared with non-COVID patients, they had a 59 percent higher risk of death during those six months. A whole slew of medical problems cropped up during that time: heart attacks, respiratory failure, diabetes, neurological problems, anxiety, and more. These patients kept showing up in doctors’ offices and used more medications. There was also a higher rate of opioid use. Not everyone runs into these problems, but they’re real. And here’s a striking comparison. You know how people say, “Oh, COVID is just like a flu”? No, it’s worse. This data, published this week in the journal Nature, compared COVID patients to flu patients. The flu patients had lower levels of all the illnesses I just mentioned. And COVID patients were more likely to die during that half-year—about 50 percent more likely"
From 2021. Apparently being ~50% more deadly than the flu was good reason to get all hysterical
As COVID-19 cases drop, some hospitals still barring families even if they’re fully vaccinated - The Globe and Mail - "Her grandmother takes good care of herself, the granddaughter said, but little things went neglected. Hearing aid batteries died and clothing went unchanged, she said. After three weeks, a doctor was in touch to say he was worried Ms. Robertson was experiencing cognitive decline. “You can’t base a diagnosis like this based on the situation she was in,” Sarah Robertson said. The doctor agreed and allowed the family to send in Ms. Robertson’s daughter to give her a pep talk. The doctor and other hospital staff immediately noticed improvement, the granddaughter recounted. A series of meetings among the family, the therapy team and floor management finally allowed two family caregivers at Ms. Robertson’s side, after nearly five weeks. Her daughter and son are now allowed to visit. But Sarah Robertson, 35, still can’t visit her grandmother, despite her complete vaccination status and eagerness to help. A hospital social worker, Sarah Robertson says she thinks a lot about how her skills as a health care advocate were required to push for limited visits. “I’m not afraid to be loud and passionate. What happens with the people who don’t know they can push?” she said. She emphasized the staff have given her grandmother excellent care, but they are handcuffed by hospital policies. “In the last 10 years, the health system has done so much to put mental health and humanity a bigger component. I feel like we’ve gone back years,” she said. Michael Warner, an intensive care physician at Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto, has advocated to loosen patient visiting rules. He says patients are delaying going to the hospital because they are afraid of being alone. “In my view, these are not evidence-based restrictions, and they harm patients and contribute to the moral distress of physicians and nurses having to tell loved ones they can’t visit,” Dr. Warner said. “At my hospital before COVID there were no visiting hours, they were 24 hours, seven days a week because we recognized the benefit of visitors at the bedside."
From 2021
Covid-19: a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in - "Greens just can’t help themselves. As the rest of us do what we can to tackle or withstand the Covid-19 crisis, they treat it as a sign, a warning from nature, a telling-off to hubristic, destructive mankind. The speed with which they have folded this pandemic into their misanthropic narrative about humanity being a pox on the planet has been shocking, but not surprising. Right from the top of the UN, they have been promoting their backward belief that this virus is a reprimand from nature. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, says ‘nature is sending us a message’ with this pandemic and other recent disasters, including bushfires in Australia and locust invasions in Kenya. Of course nature is doing no such thing, because nature is not a sentient being, however much the new religion of environmentalism might fantasise that it is. The Guardian reports that Andersen thinks humanity’s ‘destruction of the natural world for farming, housing and mining’ is making pandemics more likely... This is positively Biblical. Gaia is God in this scenario, coming to punish us for our sins. A group of scientists agrees with Andersen. They describe Covid-19 as a ‘clear warning shot’ from nature, telling human civilisation that it is ‘playing with fire’. This is the political exploitation of a horrible disease to the end of winding back human industry: what a low trick. Britain’s chief bourgeois misanthrope, George Monbiot, was hot on the heels of the UN’s eco-medievalists. He says Covid-19 has shattered humanity’s self-serving myth that it has achieved ‘insulation from natural hazards’... Monbiot and other greens seem to view Covid-19 as a disaster that will have an upside: it might roll back the Enlightenment-era belief that humankind can exercise dominion over nature and remind us that actually we are at nature’s mercy. They hope this disaster will restore nature’s power over the humanised world. This is also why so many greens online have been sharing images of dolphins swimming near Venice or an absence of airplane trails over California. Because to them, these are signs of a benefit from Covid-19: the humbling of humankind, the reining in of our industrial and technological activity, and the reassertion of nature’s awesome power. If you see a disease as a political statement, as an opportunity to pursue your pre-existing misanthropic agendas, there is something very wrong with you. Even though all of this is morally perverse, it is not surprising. For a long time, greens have viewed human beings as a pox, a virus in our own right, doing untold damage to the planet. Green god David Attenborough has said humans are ‘a plague on the planet’. Even when greens don’t use such explicitly hateful language, they constantly promote a view of human production and development as toxic and destructive. And they latch on to everything from bushfires to floods, from plagues of locusts to melting ice-caps, as signs from nature, lessons from a furious Gaia. When religious crackpots blame floods on gay marriage, claiming God is punishing us for losing the moral plot, we rightly mock them. Yet greens offer merely a secular version of such backward, apocalyptic claptrap. The truth is that if the Covid-19 crisis has shown us anything, it is how awful it would be to live in the kind of world greens dream about. Right now, courtesy of a horrible new virus, our societies look not dissimilar to the kind of societies Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, green parties and others have long been agitating for. Fewer flights, industry halted, huge infrastructure projects put on hold. Less driving, less travelling, less human interaction. Over the past few weeks, as a result of our response to Covid-19, the ‘human footprint’ will undoubtedly have shrunk. And what an awful world it has become: smaller, quieter, more atomised... Greens really should be careful when they talk about Covid-19, because it won’t be long before more and more people realise that this unpleasant emergency we are living through is just like the warped dystopia greens want to build."
No wonder the left were so upset by the lab leak theory
Those who insist that "we are the virus" should be true to their principles and off themselves
Meme - "I would take a bullet for my country"
"You would"
You wouldn't even take a stand for your neighbors"
This is an edit of the vaxhole meme claiming people wouldn't take a needle for their neighbours
We are still told that no one claimed the covid vaccines reduced transmission
Meme - Scott Dworkin @funder: "If you get fired for not getting vaccinated, just know, that you deserve it."
Scott Dworkin @funder: "Republicans need to stay the hell out of our private lives. Have a nice Friday."
Prof Francois Balloux: ‘The pandemic has created a market for gloom and doom’ - "There was a suggestion in a Sage paper that a very lethal variant could emerge, while other scientists suggest that the virus has reached its “maximum fit”, that if it evolves further it will lose the ability to coexist with its human hosts.
It’s important to balance the scariness of predictions with their likelihood. The likelihood of a lineage emerging that is 50 times more lethal is extraordinarily implausible. I say that because we have 200 respiratory viruses in circulation and most of us get infected on a regular basis. We’ve never seen that kind of sudden change in mortality. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you may have a better chance of winning the lottery jackpot many times over...
You have stated that a “non-trivial” number of long-Covid cases are psychosomatic.
We know that infections such as Covid lead to post-viral syndromes. At the risk of being insensitive, I would be surprised if there wasn’t a link between disease severity and the severity of follow-up symptoms. Like tuberculosis or influenza, people who have a severe case should expect to take a long time to recover fully. And sometimes recovery is never complete. The situation is more complicated with a mild infection. Post-viral symptoms can happen but it seems relatively implausible to me that this would happen very frequently. In all likelihood, some cases are psychosomatic – though this doesn’t make the suffering less real for those affected or reduce the cost to society. All disease is real, irrespective of its root cause. There is a mental component to health and disease. Just the fear of something bad happening to us can make us feel unwell. A remarkable example of this process can be seen in the way over 30% of the people who were enrolled in the control arm of the Pfizer vaccine trial reported headaches and fatigue, despite not being injected with a vaccine...
This issue is amplified when, as now, scientists are talking directly to the public…
Before the pandemic, scientists were rarely asked anything, or we were listened to in a polite, slightly bored way. But now people are clinging to the words of scientists, which can make it more difficult for them to change their mind. Few scientists have changed their views on Covid but when they do it’s often not well received – there’s an element of groupthink and for more media-savvy scientists, an expectation from their adoring crowd that they’re not meant to do that...
Can you explain what you mean by “scientific populism”?
As the pandemic has advanced the mood of the public has become darker and more fearful and this has created a market for gloom and doom. It’s as bad as the effects of the super-optimism at the beginning – stay at home for two weeks, it’s a mild disease or wear a mask and it will be gone. So I kind of captured the market for corona centrism – not to be systematically optimistic or pessimistic and to make it clear there are major uncertainties. And this is empowering, because understanding things is."
Remarkable level-headedness from 2021