Defenestrated wrote:
^Yeah, meant to say something about that in the US Politics thread earlier, but your post was kind of lost amidst the gun-control stuff.
Ill-Starred Son wrote:
He posted this shit on social media:
"Remember, three years ago today governors went totalitarian, stripped all your freedom without warning for absolutely no reason and destroyed the myth of freedom existing in the USA."
I wanted to hear what some intelligent people actually have to say about this because I honestly wouldn't have the right words. All I know is that it makes me extremely frustrated to have to hear that such a good friend thinks this way.
What to say about your friend's comment? Besides that it's false?
Well...I don't think people make such comments because they've honestly done the hard work of trying to understand the world. More likely, IMO, people make such comments because they sense it's expected of them, by whatever ideological community/-ies they belong to. They're "playing a part," whether they can realize and admit to this or not. (Speaking from my own experience, it's not exactly a pleasant thing to become aware of one's prejudices and deficiencies in knowledge, let alone to see one's half-baked posturing for what it is.)
In contrast, doing the hard work of trying to understand the world - this means quickly discovering your limitations, discovering which areas of human knowledge and inquiry you have a knack for, and which of the (far more numerous) remaining areas you
don't have a knack for. Nobody can master them all; nobody totally succeeds in understanding the world. What any given person
doesn't know could fill several libraries. It's unavoidable that in many/most areas of life and intellectual inquiry, one has to content oneself with rough, cursory, superficial, highly fallible impressions at most. (I'm not just talking about academics and scientists. There's hardly any grown-up person who hasn't learned vastly more about
some part of nature/society/culture - be it insects, sculpture, insurance, cars... - than you or I ever will.)
"Having a knack for medicine," for instance, means having the
competence - earned through extensive firsthand experience consisting in some form of dialogue or interaction with a community of experts - to make decisions and evaluate controversies pertaining to medicine, and to do so in a way that can be transparently explained and justified to similarly competent peers. It isn't simply that you've amassed a collection of factoids about medicine; you have some genuine insight into the methods employed by specialists to achieve and apply knowledge (and to subject it to ongoing critical scrutiny).
The flip-side of this, when you
don't have this competence, is to have the willingness to defer to people who do - in other words, to openly admit: "My views (or rather, my semi-educated hunches) on medicine are much less credible, much less well-supported, than the views of physicians and medical scientists. Given their hard-won expertise and my lack of expertise, the wisest policy for me is to trust them when they unanimously put forth something as 'established medical knowledge,' even if I find it unobvious or counterintuitive." (This isn't necessarily common sense! I think it often has to gradually dawn on a person that they aren't omni-competent. And there isn't necessarily a huge incentive to achieve this insight; instead, it's often a painful thing to find out that you've overestimated your competence.)
The opposite of this policy is "Do your own research!" - some amusing commentary on this
here.
Well said. And while I agree with almost all of that, I don't know about the "playing a part" comment. I mean maybe to an extent, but the thing about him is that he owns a business that was shut down for about six months or so during the first lockdowns, and because he's a libertarian who was too proud to accept the money he almost certainly could have gotten from the government, he used up his life savings to keep paying for the rent on his business even while it wasn't actually bringing him in any money. I never asked him if he tried to get money from the government because I know he simply wouldn't have, and I can only assume he could have gotten it because so many in his situation did.
So if the government shuts down your business and you lose money, but they give you a way out and you don't take it out of some silly notion of "pride", then you really have no one to blame but yourself. Had he done so I can only assume he'd still have his life savings.
He's a very angry person who has very specific views on subjects and a huge distrust of government. I'm not going to say I trust the government all the time, but I believe that sometimes it acts for good, whereas he generally thinks politicians are usually power hungry and trying to take our freedoms away. The irony is that while he's not a Trump supporter, he is a Rand Paul supporter, who supports Trump, and it's really the right wing that has threatened our democracy, but that's going a bit off topic.
He's an example of someone who, out of emotion, will NOT EVER defer to the experts. In fact, he would go out of his way to find podcasts with those few doctors who had an axe to grind with the medical establishment and who denied that vaccines or masks worked, and would post them and say "see, this guy says it's all bullshit."
For example, there was one doctor who was one of over 100 doctors involved in the development of MRNA vaccines in the 80s and 90s, but he had NOTHING to do with developing the covid vaccine, and he was constantly giving his arguments for why the vaccine is harmful and ineffective and why masks don't work, etc. Later on I did some research on him and found out that he was pissed off because he didn't get the credit he felt he deserved for working on the early vaccine technology, so he was out for revenge, and he'd pass himself off as "the creator of the covid vaccine" when in reality he never even played a role in that.
Then there were other doctors and medical professionals who were part of the "disinformation dozen", along with Robert Kennedy Jr. who wrote that ABSURD book criticizing Fauci, which he loved. I obviously haven't read it, but anyone who devotes so much energy to trying to discredit ONE doctor who just happens to be the figure head for vaccines and masks in the U.S. is IMO missing the point. It wouldn't matter if Fauci had a dirty history full of all sorts of lies (I doubt it really is that bad) because this pandemic is obviously world wide for one, and for two, Fauci is really only one doctor chosen to speak for thousands of others. He is not, and never has been, the one and only person who represented taking the right precautions against covid, so even if somehow you entirely devalued and discredited him, he could just be replaced by hundreds or thousands of other doctors who had the EXACT same educated opinions about covid.
He'd also constantly post studies on how "lockdowns don't work" by showing graphs and such with the number of deaths in states that did and didn't impose them. The studies did often show that much of the time the states that imposed lockdowns didn't have fewer deaths than those that didn't, but I think that means jack shit because that's not really about whether or not lockdowns work if you follow them, but about
whether or not people listen to lockdowns when they are imposed. We can't possibly know how many people obeyed the lockdowns, so there's pretty much nothing to be gained from those studies. Obviously if you don't obey a lockdown it doesn't work, and we all know that if you aren't around people with covid you don't get it and spread it so it's idiotic to claim that the actual PRINCIPLE of a lockdown doesn't work.
He's just an angry person who hates the government and has these really strong anti-government ideologies, and as an angry person with an axe to grind he will actively look for any evidence that seems to support his views and ignore that which doesn't.
The problem is how many people are just like that. He's part of a community of people who practice a sport that I like which I haven't practiced in years, and they all see things the same way as him. For some reason it must attract conservatives, who by nature have this massive distrust of any and all "authority", even when that "authority" is actually composed of medical experts who are simply trying to quell a pandemic which has now killed six million people world wide.
And yet, he claims there was "no reason whatsoever" for the lockdowns, when I'm sure had we not had them we'd have had 2-3 times as many deaths, he claims we lost all our rights which is just complete nonsense, and the claim that we are now "totalitarian" makes me think he should go check out North Korea, China and Russia and get back to me.
It's really frustrating and sad, because he's one of my best friends, and I haven't seen him in years, but I know that when I do see him again I'm going to have to tell him that I refuse to talk about covid or politics or we could get into an argument and potentially stop getting along. I don't know if he talks about it as much in person as he does online, but if he does I'm having no part of it.