This is your bubble, because in the relevant spaces they have largely incorporated COVID into the standard fighting and everything, not turned down the fighting at all. I think your bubble sounds great in lots of ways, and am glad to hear you have space from it all.
I guess in my ontology these new debates simply do not register as proper Culture Wars.
I mean, the archetypal Culture Was is a conflict of values (“we should do X”, “no, we should do Y”) where I typically care to some degree about both, so it is a question of trade-offs; combined with different models of the world (“if we do A, B will happen”, “no, C will happen”); about topics that are already discussed in some form for a few decades or centuries, and that concern many people. Or something like that; not sure I can pinpoint it. It’s like, it must feel like a grand philosophical topic, not just some technical question.
Compared with that, with COVID-19 we get the “it’s just a flu” opinion, which for me is like anti-vaxers (whom I also don’t consider a proper Culture War). To some degree it is interesting to steelman it, like to question when people die having ten serious health problems at the same time, how do we choose the official reason of death; or if we just look at total deaths, how to distinguish the second-order effects, such as more depressed people committing suicides, but also fewer traffic deaths… but at the end of the day, you either assume a worldwide conspiracy of doctors that keep healthy people needlessly attached to ventilators, or you admit it’s not just a flu. (Or you could believe that the ventilators are just a hoax promoted by government.) At the moment when even Putin’s regime officially admitted it is not a flu, I no longer see any reason to pay attention to this opinion.
Then we have this “lockdown” vs whatever is the current euphemism for just letting people die, which at least is the proper value conflict. And maybe this is about my privilege… that when people have to decide whether they’d rather lose their jobs or lose their parents, I am not that emotionally involved, because I think there is a high chance I can keep both regardless of what the nation decides to do collectively: I can work remotely; and my family voluntarily socially isolates… I am such a lucky selfish bastard, and apparently, so is my entire bubble. I mean, if you ask me, I am on the side of not letting people die, even if it means lower profits for one year. But then I hear those people complaining about how inconvenient it is to wear face masks, and how they just need to organize huge weddings, go to restaurants and cinemas and football matches… and then I realize that no one cares about my opinion how to survive best, because apparantly no one cares about surviving itself.
What else? There was this debate about whether Sweden is this magical country that doesn’t do anything about COVID-19 and yet COVID-19 avoids it completely, but recently I don’t even hear about them anymore. Maybe they all died, who knows.
Lucky bubble. Or maybe Facebook finally fixing their algorithm so that it only shows me what I want to see.
Compared with that, with COVID-19 we get the “it’s just a flu” opinion, which for me is like anti-vaxers (whom I also don’t consider a proper Culture War).
My sense is “it’s just a flu” is a conflict of values; there are people for whom regular influenza is cause for alarm and perhaps changing policies (about a year ago, I had proposed to friends the thought experiment of an annual quarantine week, wondering whether it would actually reduce the steady-state level of disease or if I was confused about how that dynamical system worked), and there are people who think that cowardice is unbecoming and illness is an unavoidable part of life. That is, some think the returns to additional worry and effort are positive; others think they are negative.
you either assume a worldwide conspiracy of doctors that keep healthy people needlessly attached to ventilators, or you admit it’s not just a flu.
Often people describe medications as “safer than aspirin”, but this is sort of silly because aspirin is one of the more dangerous medications people commonly take, grandfathered in by being discovered early. In a normal year, influenza is responsible for over half of deaths due to infectious disease in the US; the introduction of a second flu would still be a public health tragedy, from my perspective.
(Most people, I think, are operating off the case fatality rate instead of the mortality per 100k; in 2018, influenza killed about 2.5X as many people as AIDS in the US, but people are much more worried about AIDS than the flu, and for good reason.)
This is your bubble, because in the relevant spaces they have largely incorporated COVID into the standard fighting and everything, not turned down the fighting at all. I think your bubble sounds great in lots of ways, and am glad to hear you have space from it all.
I guess in my ontology these new debates simply do not register as proper Culture Wars.
I mean, the archetypal Culture Was is a conflict of values (“we should do X”, “no, we should do Y”) where I typically care to some degree about both, so it is a question of trade-offs; combined with different models of the world (“if we do A, B will happen”, “no, C will happen”); about topics that are already discussed in some form for a few decades or centuries, and that concern many people. Or something like that; not sure I can pinpoint it. It’s like, it must feel like a grand philosophical topic, not just some technical question.
Compared with that, with COVID-19 we get the “it’s just a flu” opinion, which for me is like anti-vaxers (whom I also don’t consider a proper Culture War). To some degree it is interesting to steelman it, like to question when people die having ten serious health problems at the same time, how do we choose the official reason of death; or if we just look at total deaths, how to distinguish the second-order effects, such as more depressed people committing suicides, but also fewer traffic deaths… but at the end of the day, you either assume a worldwide conspiracy of doctors that keep healthy people needlessly attached to ventilators, or you admit it’s not just a flu. (Or you could believe that the ventilators are just a hoax promoted by government.) At the moment when even Putin’s regime officially admitted it is not a flu, I no longer see any reason to pay attention to this opinion.
Then we have this “lockdown” vs whatever is the current euphemism for just letting people die, which at least is the proper value conflict. And maybe this is about my privilege… that when people have to decide whether they’d rather lose their jobs or lose their parents, I am not that emotionally involved, because I think there is a high chance I can keep both regardless of what the nation decides to do collectively: I can work remotely; and my family voluntarily socially isolates… I am such a lucky selfish bastard, and apparently, so is my entire bubble. I mean, if you ask me, I am on the side of not letting people die, even if it means lower profits for one year. But then I hear those people complaining about how inconvenient it is to wear face masks, and how they just need to organize huge weddings, go to restaurants and cinemas and football matches… and then I realize that no one cares about my opinion how to survive best, because apparantly no one cares about surviving itself.
What else? There was this debate about whether Sweden is this magical country that doesn’t do anything about COVID-19 and yet COVID-19 avoids it completely, but recently I don’t even hear about them anymore. Maybe they all died, who knows.
Lucky bubble. Or maybe Facebook finally fixing their algorithm so that it only shows me what I want to see.
My sense is “it’s just a flu” is a conflict of values; there are people for whom regular influenza is cause for alarm and perhaps changing policies (about a year ago, I had proposed to friends the thought experiment of an annual quarantine week, wondering whether it would actually reduce the steady-state level of disease or if I was confused about how that dynamical system worked), and there are people who think that cowardice is unbecoming and illness is an unavoidable part of life. That is, some think the returns to additional worry and effort are positive; others think they are negative.
Often people describe medications as “safer than aspirin”, but this is sort of silly because aspirin is one of the more dangerous medications people commonly take, grandfathered in by being discovered early. In a normal year, influenza is responsible for over half of deaths due to infectious disease in the US; the introduction of a second flu would still be a public health tragedy, from my perspective.
(Most people, I think, are operating off the case fatality rate instead of the mortality per 100k; in 2018, influenza killed about 2.5X as many people as AIDS in the US, but people are much more worried about AIDS than the flu, and for good reason.)