Your take on vaccines is lazy. You really need to distinguish between the effectiveness of the vaccines and their side effects. The critical point is that the distributions of benefits and risks across the population are very different! The vaccine is good for some people, but inappropriate for others. Our society is currently too imbecilic to implement any policy which acknowledges this, resulting in mandates for children and healthy young people, which are statistically actively harmful.
The covid jab is not a vaccine. It does not prevent transmission or infection and has a dangerous side effect profile. One can support the legacy vaccines that work and have been tested extensively, but be against the covid jabs and the disgusting mandates that accompanied them.
They changed the definition from something that prevents transmission and infection to something that stimulates immune response. You pay for noahpinion, as they say a fool and his money are easily parted.
I also pay for The Dispatch, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, and The National Review, because I actually read people who disagree with me.
Speaking of fools, no existing vaccine fully prevents infection or transmission. By your definition, humanity has not yet invented this panaceae called “vaccine.”
So was a qualified dissent on the efficacy of the vaccines, but many of us got banned for that. Now you're left with the crazies.
"The vaccines work at preventing very severe symptoms from COVID in many cases, and are to be advised for vulnerable populations for that reason. They do not, however, confer much, if any, actual protection against contracting COVID. Additionally, they are flatly unnecessary for those not at risk of hospitalization or death from COVID, and are in fact not to be advised to be given out to just anyone due to the very small but very real risk of heart issues deriving from the mRNA vaccines" was ban-worthy in the public square for the better part of two years.
It also happens to be completely true, every word of it, as health boards in many places (such as Denmark) are now publicly admitting.
You have a massive blind spot here if you're sticking to the line that they "work", and that this is some kind of nuanced view that was subject to cost-benefit analysis. It's simply untrue.
Yeah, but this isn't really correct either. "Not at risk of hospitalization or death from COVID" doesn't exist. For example, there have been 6,616 deaths in the US in the 18-29 demographic from COVID. Some countries specifically give men in that age group Pfizer rather than Moderna vaccine because the dose is lower, but there's no good case that vaccination is on the whole more dangerous than COVID in that age group, and that's the bracket that has the highest vaccine risk.
Looking at the chart in that Substack it is clear that excess mortality in the 25 - 44 demographic:
1. Starts with the pandemic, well before COVID vaccines existed
2. Shows spikes coincident with COVID mortality in the elderly (note that there have been 18,982 deaths in the 30-39 demographic and 44,453 in the 40-49 demographic) and shows no significant correspondence with vaccine rollout in early 2021. Incidentally the delta wave is especially striking. The average age of delta victims was substantially younger than earlier waves. Younger people had lower vaccination rates, and spread was happening everywhere, not just nursing homes.
So a significant chunk of the excess mortality in that age group was COVID deaths. Clearly they suffered most heavily from the rise in drug overdoses and homicides as well. No evidence for vaccine mortality.
There is an elevated baseline due to policy changes.
Whoever tested positive for COVID-19 in a care setting surely received special treatment, even if COVID was incidental. I'm guessing it wasn't the good kind of special. That explains the waves.
This is no zero sum game. How many of those six thousand were already on their way to the pearly gates? I’m guessing these were not healthy people to begin with. That’s what viruses like this do - they take out the vulnerable. To put this number up assuming the number would be zero without covid is intellectually lazy at best. Sure, maybe some people in this group should take the vax because they are in greater danger from covid, but that’s a much much smaller group than everyone in the cohort.
The young men at risk are more likely to die from COVID, because the COVID spike protein may affect their heart muscle. The vaccine mimics that spike protein, which is why the vaccine is somewhat more dangerous for young men and boys. But their risk of contracting COVID and dying from the real COVID spike protein is appreciably greater.
You can see that the relative protective effect of the vaccine is higher the younger you are. Compare ~80% reduction in fatality the 80+ demographic to ~100% in the under 50. Likewise wherever I've seen this tabulated, the average age of vaccinated fatalities is much higher (like ~20 years) than unvaccinated. Young people have good immune systems and respond better to vaccines than the very elderly.
Even if Florida's claim that the vaccine causes a very small number of heart attack deaths in young men is correct, and there weren't a lot of cases in that study, the Florida Surgeon General explicitly cited the "high level of global immunity to COVID-19" as a factor in his recommendation that young men not get the vaccine. In other words, by now, you've probably had COVID already so the benefit of the vaccine is limited. This doesn't vindicate the people who urged everyone not to get vaccinated in March 2021, when a large fraction of the population was immunologically naive.
Thing on the right? That’s your reasoning? Wow. Maybe a discussion to be had? Well there are people having that discussion, and labeling them “right wing” is worse than lazy. Certain age groups, at virtually no risk from covid, are experiencing an unprecedented rise in myocardial issues. Not to mention all the sudden deaths. Even if no one yet knows the actual risk of the vax yet, even a cursory look at the numbers should prompt the question whether it might well be above the risk from the disease itself. It sure looks that way. I for one am not hand waving that away.
Serious researchers conclude after billions of injections: "The excess risk of serious adverse events [from mRNA vaccination] found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes." https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.036
Personally, I'm waiting for that formal harm-benefit analysis before proceeding.
Vaccine mandates were never very widespread and usually DID provide for exceptions for those most likely to have side effects. Resistance of "groups" just looked like posturing that cared nothing for the welfare of the non-vaccinated.
The big vaccine failure was not too widespread mandating, but no to have followed the first success with better optimized boosters, and development of pan variant vaccines and nasally administered vaccines.
I was also shocked by “covid vaccines are good.” For the vast majority, a cursory risk/benefit analysis shows most of the risk on the vax side with little to no benefit. Is the author misinformed or just uninformed?
Congrats. They saved a bunch of near dead old folks at the expense of permanent heart damage to their young, and probable long run auto-immune and cancer issues.
"This increases the plausibility that it was the weaker strains, moreso than vaccines, which helped these countries."
Well, that's an honest edit.
There is also this problem what is becoming more and more apparent in the vaccinated community: OAS.
The elderly are more vulnerable to covid, the jab or any change to their immune system. The best outcomes have been with early treatment using antivirus therapeutics. When it comes down to that final analysis, I don't think any group is going to show a benefit from being jabbed.
There are basically no harms from being "jabbed", and a high death rate from COVID among the elderly. That's why the death rate was so high early on but reduced after vaccination spread among them, and why the death rate has been so much higher among the unvaccinated. I linked to this above in this thread, but will now do so again for you:
How has Australia kept such low excess deaths even as their cases have risen recently? Why are deaths concentrated so much more among the unvaccinated? Perhaps it's clearer to me because I read Greg Cochran and have seen him repeatedly win bets about COVID from people who were highly confident despite not knowing what they were talking about.
Maybe Australia's care system is better than America's? Young people die in the US at nearly 40% elevated rates, it's seemingly not a direct result of COVID, and our medical community doesn't even mention it. https://norstadt.substack.com/p/excess-us-deaths-for-25-to-44-year
Vaccines are something of an exception, in that they use our immune system which has evolved for a very long time to be effective. Throughout most of human history medicine made you worse off.
There is also the divergence of deaths that occurred in the US after vaccines became available, being concentrated more in areas where Trump's support was higher (this is bizarre, since Trump's Operation Warp Speed got us the vaccine in 2020 despite liberals trying to slam the brakes, but Trump's supporters have cowed even him from bragging about it).
A lot of people think that in order for heterodox academy to have any foothold whatsoever in mainstream academia, they have to focus on “viewpoint diversity” rather than simply saying that the academy’s mainstream positions on specific identity-based subjects are flat out wrong. Not sure I fully agree, but I can see where they’re coming from.
As far as heterodox vs “free thinker”, I think a lot of people (myself included) use them to mean the same thing. The latter just sounds cringe for some reason, even if it’s more correct.
I agree that’s their motivation. The problem is I think you need to attack the bad ideas directly at some point. Universities aren’t going to allow you to sneak non-woke ideas in through the back door, the system has too many defenses against that. More importantly, everything has an opportunity cost and it’s a waste for the best non-leftist thinkers to be talking about “heterodoxy” instead of the influence of genes.
There's generally too much obsession with what is "cool" and what is "cringe". We've reached a crippling level of self awareness where any new term that crops up is deemed stale within a week.
Right. People who describe themselves that way in my experience tend to treat "thinking" as a way to show how much smarter they are than the norm, rather than as something that's good to do for its own sake.
Exactly what I was thinking. Reddit atheists (mostly known as new atheists) called themselves "free thinkers" and were not particularly good at it. They often made the most basic of philosophy errors and it was easy to refute them. It also sounds smug.
Excellent piece, I often cringe when I read pieces by self proclaimed “dissident right” figures that are long on scaremongering about “the regime” and short on actual analysis. It pretty much amounts to an emasculating orgy of self pity written exclusively to indulge the people who already buy in to their world view, rather than convince anyone on the fence.
I think the “noise” generated from Twitter overshadowed the fact that Richard is one of the few really interesting thinkers on the “right” currently. Hoping to see more opportunities to convey these ideas to a wider audience now that the Twitter presence is reduced.
I think that "heterodox" connotes mainstream credentials but not mainstream views. That describes me in economics. It describes Richard in foreign policy, does it not?
That describes me too, but there is or ought to be too wide a variety of non-mainstream views for "heterodox," which to me implies difference along a fairly small number of dimensions from a pretty monolithic "orthodoxy."
This is the same basic reason why I really abhor being called a "contrarian". In my head, I really don't feel like I'm motivated by a primal urge to look at what the majority of people are saying and say the exact opposite. Like you, I believe the majority is correct on certain issues (evolution is true, Covid vaccines reduce the risk of death etc.) and incorrect on others (there are no differences between male and female brains, discrimination is the sole explanation behind the underrepresentation of women in STEM etc.).
I suspect that the people tossing around the label "contrarian" are so deeply steeped in social conformity that the only reason they can conceive of someone endorsing a particularly worldview is BECAUSE of conformism (or its opposite). The idea of a person endorsing a worldview because they sincerely believe it's true (without regard for how popular it is) seems not to occur to them.
Absolutely. But when a person expresses a sentiment which goes against the grain, I don't think one's knee-jerk assumption should be that they're motivated by contrarianism.
There is something to be said about the psychology of average right-wing "dissident." This is someone who can instinctively tell something is amiss about what the MSM says, but lacks any level of intellectual seriousness. Conspiracy theories are appealing, because conspiracy theories explain why the media lies and why bad things are happening without requiring any work. They appeal deeply to the low IQ. Watching strange documentaries and listening to podcasts by grifters substitutes for actually reading arguments and counterarguments and thinking.
I always wondered why conspiracy theorists never apply any of their (often well-placed) skepticism toward their own theories. You know about all of these studies showing how dangerous vaccines are, but why do you have no skepticism of ivermectin? But I realized, the truth is not the point. The truth is not the point for most people, after all. Conspiracy theorizing, reflexive contrarianness, these fill a certain psychological need.
Well, this comments section certainly seems to bolster his point.
You’ve got a ton of people so committed to the correct point that lockdowns were unnecessary and authoritarian that they’ve decided the entire medical establishment is engaged in a conspiracy about the lethality of covid and effectiveness of vaccines.
Give me a break. You people are as loony as the leftists crying about “corporate medicine” and “profiting off of sickness”.
There was a concerted effort -- from corporate media outlets, social media companies, Democratic politicians, and the medical establishment -- to make it verboten to point out that COVID posed essentially zero risk of death to the majority of people. You don't have to believe in a conspiracy to understand this; in most cases "conspiracies" are just people acting according to their social and financial incentives.
COVID had a 5% mortality rate when it first broke onto the scene! Then it had a 2% mortality rate, which is still enormous!
It was a completely different virus. Even young, healthy people who caught the first round of it described it as the sickest they'd been in their life, and said for months after that it hurt to breath, and they could barely walk up a flight of stairs.
"Essentially" and "majority" are lifting your entire worldview. Depending on who you ask (especially anti-vaxxers), "essentially zero" risk of death could be as high as 5%, and "the majority" literally could be 50.1% of people. That's a lot of harm to be reduced.
Fair enough, but come on, dissenting from Wokeism can very well mean the end of one's employment, and indeed employability, in many precincts of the educated elite.
Sure it's not the Gulag, or even the Inquisition, but it's at least McCarthyism. but aren't unwoke just a tiny bit entitled to use "dissident"-type language to describe their beliefs?
Well, one of my main themes is the importance of freedom of association, and how evil civil rights laws are for taking that away from people. So no, I don’t consider people not wanting to associate with others to be a restriction on freedom.
I respect the principled stance, but I simply don't think that "not wanting to associate with others" adequately captures the difference in magnitude of all the following scenarios:
* not wanting to patronize the local fundamentalist Christian / queer BIPOC indie bookstore because you don't like their beliefs
* having all your books removed from Amazon because Amazon doesn't like your beliefs
* choosing not to visit the woke doctor because you don't like xir stance on "trans kids"
* not being able to practice as a doctor because you refuse to mouth the woke dogma on "trans kids"
I guess my point is that the monopolistic power of Big Tech or woke professional / credentialing associations seems to go above and beyond the 'freedom of association' of individual citizens or even individual groups / corporations of citizens.
> aren't unwoke just a tiny bit entitled to use "dissident"-type language to describe their beliefs?
I agree that the language is technically accurate, but it comes across a lot differently when someone self-describes as a dissident, compared to when someone else describes them with that label.
Granted, you could probably say the same about any other adjective with positive connotations.
This brings to mind something Tony Judt pointed out when talking about dissident intellectuals and artists in the USSR and other communist countries: Persecution was no guarantee of quality. Lots of the writers who struggled along in the underground publishing circles of Eastern Europe, lauded as heroes in the West, faded from view after 1989 because they just weren't particularly talented or interesting artists or thinkers. Many could have got out earlier but chose not to, preferring to be oppressed, as at least it made their work notable. I think many modern "dissident" authors are clamouring for a bit of that oppression chic, because on the market for content, it can substitute for quality or originality. But, as you pointed out, modern-day USA isn't exactly communist Poland as far as freedom of speech goes. That's not to say there aren't real censorship problems to discuss, but then discuss them, don't just poke the bear then try to get famous off getting lightly mauled.
1. This article seems a little at odds with your essay on How to Think about the Current Thing. In that you outlined why relying on heuristics is important when we have limited time to form opinions. You wrote "I would argue that a probabilistic approach suggests that we should be anti-current thing." But in this article you say that using anti-liberal heuristics "sometimes works, but it’s not the best way to go through life." Is the former advice for normies, while the latter advice for those who care to read about topics?
2. “free thinker” likely won't take on now that Kanye is using that term while claiming Jews are killing black babies. Gen Z uses the term exclusively sarcastically online. The best case scenario is that you get so famous that "Hananiaism" becomes your ideological label.
Government of Canada was just fine freezing all the bank accounts of those they claimed directly or indirectly supported the Convoy. No trial or anything. No warrant.
I know it's not the point of the post but to say that "covid vaccines work" is far too simplistic a stance to be considered either right or wrong. You can make a claim that they work to prevent hospitalization, particularly among very vulnerable populations; that claim would be true. But then you can claim, as many did (and as many were banned from the public square for denying) that COVID vaccines prevent you from getting sick at all, which is clearly and obviously untrue. If you believe the latter then you probably are just room-reading, despite any illusions to the contrary, as absolutely no evidence exists in favor of that and a great deal exists against it.
People develop these blind spots, even when they think they're operating on the truth-value of claims, out of self-preservation. There are some buttons you just know not to press. For months, in fact a couple of years, the no-questions-asked, miracle-cure-all efficacy of the mRNA vaccines was one of these things. If you or anyone else still holds *that* definition of "covid vaccines work" to be true, I bet this is a factor, that it remains - vestigial - in their mind that it's unthinkable to dissent, even though now the medical establishment is quietly admitting that they "work" only in a qualified, limited way.
Your overall point, however, is a very good one, and that right wingers like to use the "oh, we poor benighted heretics are just oppressed by leftists at every turn, no wonder we can't do anything" line as cope is 100% true. To take the 2020 election as an example: we could have seen what was happening in Georgia, with the liberalization of election laws, and the very impressive GOTV operation run by the Democrats, and tried to fight fire with fire. No, much easier instead to say that there were fake ballots and fraud and everything, rather than do any actual work. A bunch of self-owns from Trump about mail-in ballots didn't help; the complete absence of any kind of GOTV operation from the Republicans did for the rest. Rather than reflect on that and do the work, much easier just to call yourself a heretic and a secret king and say that elections don't matter because they're all rigged and democracy is stupid anyway.
Most people care about covid because of the risk of serious hospitalization or death. That’s the whole reason we treated covid seriously in the first place. The vaccines therefore “work” when it comes to the most important thing we care about, and saved millions of lives. If you had a treatment for cancer that stopped you from dying from the disease or getting seriously ill we would say the treatment “works” regardless of whether it eliminated all traces of cancer in the body.
The risk of serious hospitalization or death was actually minimal. In line with what happens every single year with the flu. Just because it was hyped to the skies as the new Black Death doesn’t mean it was. The sickest and oldest people, genuinely at risk, still had a 99.85 chance of survival. It was never comparable to a cancer diagnosis. “The vaccine saved millions of lives” is pure assertion. You may believe it, but it’s not based on data.
Most people *now* care about them for that reason. I don't know where you lived during the vaccine rollout, but here in the US we were all locked down, masked, distanced, and unable to gather. Consequently death was a concern, but not the main one. Rather, the vaccines were sold to the public as a prerequisite of a return to normalcy. Specifically: public figures, up to and including Fauci, said the vaccines conferred protection not just against hospitalization, but infection as a whole. They also said we'd be allowed outside again if we took them. They also said not being vaccinated would cause the hospital system to be overloaded. Retconning this to be about death and "serious" hospitalization might help you avoid asking some tough questions of yourself about your credulity, but it utterly and completely fails even cursory examination.
Yeah you seem to be throwing a lot of stuff together there. Fauci also said the vaccine would save lives and it did. I heavily criticize masks and lockdowns, I think they are war crimes. It doesn’t change the fact that the vaccine works. I’m not trying to win an argument with Fauci.
How, by accurately explaining how vaccines were regarded by the public health authorities, and communicated thus to yhr public, am *I* throwing things together? They threw it together; I just chose to remember it, while you've chosen to remember only the bit that makes your prior judgment correct. You're simply wrong when you say that the motivation for mass vaccination was solely - in fact even primarily - to prevent death and "serious" hospitalization. They were primarily to allow us to return to normal social life by preventing transmission and infection - a *byproduct* of which is the absence of death and hospitalization. You can keep being wrong about this, I don't care, but I'm not the one who was wrong about what the vaccines do and what they were for. That was the public health establishment.
It was obviously both. Vaccines were supposed to save lives and allow us to get back to normal. The reason most people cared about covid in the first place, the reason they got all this power in the first place, was because of the worst effects of the disease.
As for the public health community, they were right about some things and wrong about many others. And I agree that they are bad people who lie and support evil policies and should be opposed. Why quibble over whether the vaccine works or not? It simply does by any reasonable definition of the term.
We know each others' viewpoints on what the vaccines were touted as to the public now, and I am content to agree to disagree on that.
The reason, however, to quibble over the definitions that *the people empowered to govern public health* are using is this: at that point, at the point of public health expenditure, of vaccine mandates, and of the risk (however slight) of vaccine injury, these definitions matter a hell of a lot. The efficacy of the vaccine at preventing transmission matters a hell of a lot. It's not to be right on the internet. It's to ensure that we as a free people have the right to demand transparency over what these vaccines do and do not do, and make a cost-benefit analysis based on *that*, *at the time of dose*, not what has been retconned into being eighteen months later.
If, in March 2021, I said that "the outcome of the vaccine rollout is that in my heavily-vaccinated county, almost many people will die from COVID in January 2022 as did in January 2021, and this is after January 2021 took out a lot of the most vulnerable", I would have been accused of denying the efficacy of the vaccines and I would have been removed from the internet. Yet this is exactly what happened. How can the definition *not* matter - and how, given this, can the definition that the public health authorities gave be anything but *by your own standards* massively unreasonable?
Once again: I remember. You don't. Your beef is with the public health authorities, not me.
Works for some, damages others. The jury is still out whether they were a net benefit. Since we don’t have anything like impartiality these days, I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
It needs to be repeated that on any mainstream platform, saying the above until very recently would have gotten you flagged for misinformation and very possibly banned, and that this directive came (as Alex Berenson has shown during legal discovery) from the White House.
But sure, let's not quibble over definitions of things like "vaccine" and "work." I'm sure the very same people who governed the roll-out for this one have the appropriate level of hubris to be a wee bit more cautious next time!
If we're talking about public health authorities, I'd actually prefer if they were lying, because the alternative is they really, really don't know what they're doing.
"They also seem discerning enough to be able to tell the difference between establishment positions that are correct (covid vaccines are good) and those that are wrong (systemic racism)."
I think about this regarding healthcare: I've written a lot about the ways that the FDA especially is bad and impedes the development of new treatments (something you talked to my wife about: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/sorting-through-498000-clinical-trials). There are also too many restrictions on who becomes doctors and how. I can go through some other ways healthcare provision is not great, and, considering that healthcare spending is close to 20% of GDP and touches the lives of almost everyone, the issue is important.
At the same time, however, I don't identify as a radical healthcare skeptic: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/11/on-not-being-a-radical-medicine-skeptic-and-the-dangers-of-doctor-by-internet/. It is in fact good and useful to try to figure out what works and what doesn't, and most potential treatments don't work. People who claim homeopathy works are wrong. I've gotten a lot of what might be called "interesting" emails and comments from people who are like: "Right on, man!" about the FDA, but who then have non-functional or inaccurate views about doctors or medicine.
"Sometimes the establishment is right and kooks on the internet are wrong! In fact, that’s the right assumption when it comes to most things."
That is exactly right! Therefore it is usefull to use labels such as "heterodox", so we can lower our initial credence in anything that goes against the establishment.
Of course we should then listen and evaluate each argumet on its merits, and this would result in updating our belief, but the result of the update is different if the prior belief was different (i.e. a Bayesian update).
I agree with this piece, and aspire to a similar ideal of independent thinking. And yet, at a certain point in my life I came to realize that I am, constitutionally speaking, an intuitive contrarian. If everyone likes something, my first instinct is to dislike it. If everyone does something, my first instinct is to do something else. And if everyone thinks something, my first instinct is to assume they are all wrong.
This is merely an initial instinct, which with the passage of time I've gotten better at dismissing where it might cause needless hassle (e.g., rejecting fashion norms) or where it would simply lead me into error. Nevertheless, having a bit of intuitive contrarianism can be helpful, because it means that adopting either side of an issue bears costs:
1. adopting the popular position bears an intuitive emotional cost
2. being an intuitive contrarian doesn't exempt one from all the usual costs of unpopular opinions (social censure, ostracism, etc.)
Since both sides bear costs, it can be hoped that one will choose more carefully. (Moreover, if we look at truth-finding as a social, dialogic process, then having some interlocutors predisposed to take up contrary positions is useful, cf Sperber & Mercier's *Enigma of Reason*.)
The problem is that the side relying on solemn debates about ideas is strictly outmatched by the side relying on tribal loyalty and fanaticism.
It's important for at least some influential elites to be aware of what the truth actually is, to the extent 'truth' can be discerned. But on a practical level, the only force capable of turning back a movement like Wokeism is an equally (or even more) intolerant and fanatical opposing movement. Stated differently, if you get what you want out of American politics, it'll be thanks to the legions of MAGA Trump cultists and devoted 'Christo-Fascists' rather than some sort of New Enlightenment rejection of leftism.
I had similar thoughts. RH says the Left “wants it more”, which suggests idealism, but he also said on Twitter that “liberalism has been crazy for 60 years” (he used busing as an example). Granted not all progressives/Leftists are fanatics, but their idealism manifests itself in unrealistic statist goals and is anti-liberty. To oppose them requires real dedication. There aren’t any GULAGS, but there are risks.
Your take on vaccines is lazy. You really need to distinguish between the effectiveness of the vaccines and their side effects. The critical point is that the distributions of benefits and risks across the population are very different! The vaccine is good for some people, but inappropriate for others. Our society is currently too imbecilic to implement any policy which acknowledges this, resulting in mandates for children and healthy young people, which are statistically actively harmful.
I agree there’s maybe a discussion to be had about cost-benefits to certain age groups, but flat out anti-vaxx is definitely a thing on the right now.
The covid jab is not a vaccine. It does not prevent transmission or infection and has a dangerous side effect profile. One can support the legacy vaccines that work and have been tested extensively, but be against the covid jabs and the disgusting mandates that accompanied them.
“The covid jab is not a vaccine”
I see we’re redefining what a vaccine is now...
Jesus, Hanania is right, how can you have any self-respect when your only moral values are whatever liberals hate?
They changed the definition from something that prevents transmission and infection to something that stimulates immune response. You pay for noahpinion, as they say a fool and his money are easily parted.
I also pay for The Dispatch, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, and The National Review, because I actually read people who disagree with me.
Speaking of fools, no existing vaccine fully prevents infection or transmission. By your definition, humanity has not yet invented this panaceae called “vaccine.”
The COVID vaccine is more effective than the flu vaccine, and we still called that thing a vaccine. Should I write "flu v_____e"
Well its not. The CDC literally redefined vaccine to accept the mRNA jab into the category.
I suppose it depends on which moving goal post you'd prefer to chase?
So was a qualified dissent on the efficacy of the vaccines, but many of us got banned for that. Now you're left with the crazies.
"The vaccines work at preventing very severe symptoms from COVID in many cases, and are to be advised for vulnerable populations for that reason. They do not, however, confer much, if any, actual protection against contracting COVID. Additionally, they are flatly unnecessary for those not at risk of hospitalization or death from COVID, and are in fact not to be advised to be given out to just anyone due to the very small but very real risk of heart issues deriving from the mRNA vaccines" was ban-worthy in the public square for the better part of two years.
It also happens to be completely true, every word of it, as health boards in many places (such as Denmark) are now publicly admitting.
You have a massive blind spot here if you're sticking to the line that they "work", and that this is some kind of nuanced view that was subject to cost-benefit analysis. It's simply untrue.
Yeah, but this isn't really correct either. "Not at risk of hospitalization or death from COVID" doesn't exist. For example, there have been 6,616 deaths in the US in the 18-29 demographic from COVID. Some countries specifically give men in that age group Pfizer rather than Moderna vaccine because the dose is lower, but there's no good case that vaccination is on the whole more dangerous than COVID in that age group, and that's the bracket that has the highest vaccine risk.
Were those deaths with COVID or of COVID? How many had co-morbidities? I honestly want to know, and without the answers those numbers are meaningless.
Does asking those questions makes me an anti-vaxxer? Also, 6616 deaths is minuscule compared to recent excess all-cause mortality (over 100k) among 25-44 year olds. https://norstadt.substack.com/p/excess-us-deaths-for-25-to-44-year
Looking at the chart in that Substack it is clear that excess mortality in the 25 - 44 demographic:
1. Starts with the pandemic, well before COVID vaccines existed
2. Shows spikes coincident with COVID mortality in the elderly (note that there have been 18,982 deaths in the 30-39 demographic and 44,453 in the 40-49 demographic) and shows no significant correspondence with vaccine rollout in early 2021. Incidentally the delta wave is especially striking. The average age of delta victims was substantially younger than earlier waves. Younger people had lower vaccination rates, and spread was happening everywhere, not just nursing homes.
So a significant chunk of the excess mortality in that age group was COVID deaths. Clearly they suffered most heavily from the rise in drug overdoses and homicides as well. No evidence for vaccine mortality.
There is an elevated baseline due to policy changes.
Whoever tested positive for COVID-19 in a care setting surely received special treatment, even if COVID was incidental. I'm guessing it wasn't the good kind of special. That explains the waves.
This is no zero sum game. How many of those six thousand were already on their way to the pearly gates? I’m guessing these were not healthy people to begin with. That’s what viruses like this do - they take out the vulnerable. To put this number up assuming the number would be zero without covid is intellectually lazy at best. Sure, maybe some people in this group should take the vax because they are in greater danger from covid, but that’s a much much smaller group than everyone in the cohort.
The young men at risk are more likely to die from COVID, because the COVID spike protein may affect their heart muscle. The vaccine mimics that spike protein, which is why the vaccine is somewhat more dangerous for young men and boys. But their risk of contracting COVID and dying from the real COVID spike protein is appreciably greater.
How many of those 6k were vaccinated?
In case you missed it, I asked you how many of those 6,616 were vaccinated.
I don't know the precise number, but from data like this I'd extrapolate very few:
https://www.bbc.com/news/59757395
You can see that the relative protective effect of the vaccine is higher the younger you are. Compare ~80% reduction in fatality the 80+ demographic to ~100% in the under 50. Likewise wherever I've seen this tabulated, the average age of vaccinated fatalities is much higher (like ~20 years) than unvaccinated. Young people have good immune systems and respond better to vaccines than the very elderly.
Even if Florida's claim that the vaccine causes a very small number of heart attack deaths in young men is correct, and there weren't a lot of cases in that study, the Florida Surgeon General explicitly cited the "high level of global immunity to COVID-19" as a factor in his recommendation that young men not get the vaccine. In other words, by now, you've probably had COVID already so the benefit of the vaccine is limited. This doesn't vindicate the people who urged everyone not to get vaccinated in March 2021, when a large fraction of the population was immunologically naive.
Thing on the right? That’s your reasoning? Wow. Maybe a discussion to be had? Well there are people having that discussion, and labeling them “right wing” is worse than lazy. Certain age groups, at virtually no risk from covid, are experiencing an unprecedented rise in myocardial issues. Not to mention all the sudden deaths. Even if no one yet knows the actual risk of the vax yet, even a cursory look at the numbers should prompt the question whether it might well be above the risk from the disease itself. It sure looks that way. I for one am not hand waving that away.
Serious researchers conclude after billions of injections: "The excess risk of serious adverse events [from mRNA vaccination] found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes." https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2022.08.036
Personally, I'm waiting for that formal harm-benefit analysis before proceeding.
All vaccination programs, like all other policies should be subject to cost benefit analysis.
They - the respectable people of this country - were saying Ron DeSantis was engaging in "human sacrifice" when FL opened up. All forgotten now.
Vaccine mandates were never very widespread and usually DID provide for exceptions for those most likely to have side effects. Resistance of "groups" just looked like posturing that cared nothing for the welfare of the non-vaccinated.
The big vaccine failure was not too widespread mandating, but no to have followed the first success with better optimized boosters, and development of pan variant vaccines and nasally administered vaccines.
I was also shocked by “covid vaccines are good.” For the vast majority, a cursory risk/benefit analysis shows most of the risk on the vax side with little to no benefit. Is the author misinformed or just uninformed?
There is a clear benefit when you look at excess deaths:
https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor
Congrats. They saved a bunch of near dead old folks at the expense of permanent heart damage to their young, and probable long run auto-immune and cancer issues.
"This increases the plausibility that it was the weaker strains, moreso than vaccines, which helped these countries."
Well, that's an honest edit.
There is also this problem what is becoming more and more apparent in the vaccinated community: OAS.
"Probable long run"? As in you have no evidence for this and just decided to make it up.
If you're curious you can look it up. I don't share links to people I've never met. You'll simply attack the source, or me, which you've already done.
The mRNA vaccinations are killing people who would have otherwise been perfectly fine.
Thats a fact.
Suuuuuure. And the moon is made of green cheese. Don't believe me? Look it up. Anyone can assert something is a fact.
Perhaps he is just "reading the room" and doesn't want to be too heterodox....
Too bad the vaccine RCTs didn't identify any population groups for whom the treatment is a net benefit.
The elderly clearly benefit.
The elderly are more vulnerable to covid, the jab or any change to their immune system. The best outcomes have been with early treatment using antivirus therapeutics. When it comes down to that final analysis, I don't think any group is going to show a benefit from being jabbed.
There are basically no harms from being "jabbed", and a high death rate from COVID among the elderly. That's why the death rate was so high early on but reduced after vaccination spread among them, and why the death rate has been so much higher among the unvaccinated. I linked to this above in this thread, but will now do so again for you:
https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor
Maxim Lott actually looked for data that would indicate what was effective against COVID rather than relying on bald assertion.
The fact that you have to argue something so obvious is a huge downside to Hanania's comment section.
Deathe rate is high only for thoes not doing early treatments with anti-viral therapeutics
What data do you have supporting that?
Clear as mud.
How has Australia kept such low excess deaths even as their cases have risen recently? Why are deaths concentrated so much more among the unvaccinated? Perhaps it's clearer to me because I read Greg Cochran and have seen him repeatedly win bets about COVID from people who were highly confident despite not knowing what they were talking about.
Maybe Australia's care system is better than America's? Young people die in the US at nearly 40% elevated rates, it's seemingly not a direct result of COVID, and our medical community doesn't even mention it. https://norstadt.substack.com/p/excess-us-deaths-for-25-to-44-year
Medicine, on the margin, has little effect on health once you reach first-world territory.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/
Vaccines are something of an exception, in that they use our immune system which has evolved for a very long time to be effective. Throughout most of human history medicine made you worse off.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/medicine-as-a-pseudoscience/
There is also the divergence of deaths that occurred in the US after vaccines became available, being concentrated more in areas where Trump's support was higher (this is bizarre, since Trump's Operation Warp Speed got us the vaccine in 2020 despite liberals trying to slam the brakes, but Trump's supporters have cowed even him from bragging about it).
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/to-be-clear-this-is-not-going-to
?????
The side effects are so minor as to be ignored.
In other words, the vax trials were bollocks.
A lot of people think that in order for heterodox academy to have any foothold whatsoever in mainstream academia, they have to focus on “viewpoint diversity” rather than simply saying that the academy’s mainstream positions on specific identity-based subjects are flat out wrong. Not sure I fully agree, but I can see where they’re coming from.
As far as heterodox vs “free thinker”, I think a lot of people (myself included) use them to mean the same thing. The latter just sounds cringe for some reason, even if it’s more correct.
I agree that’s their motivation. The problem is I think you need to attack the bad ideas directly at some point. Universities aren’t going to allow you to sneak non-woke ideas in through the back door, the system has too many defenses against that. More importantly, everything has an opportunity cost and it’s a waste for the best non-leftist thinkers to be talking about “heterodoxy” instead of the influence of genes.
Good comments. And I like your writing style. Have u considered doing your own substack? Just for fun or whatever.
There's generally too much obsession with what is "cool" and what is "cringe". We've reached a crippling level of self awareness where any new term that crops up is deemed stale within a week.
Right. People who describe themselves that way in my experience tend to treat "thinking" as a way to show how much smarter they are than the norm, rather than as something that's good to do for its own sake.
Exactly what I was thinking. Reddit atheists (mostly known as new atheists) called themselves "free thinkers" and were not particularly good at it. They often made the most basic of philosophy errors and it was easy to refute them. It also sounds smug.
Excellent piece, I often cringe when I read pieces by self proclaimed “dissident right” figures that are long on scaremongering about “the regime” and short on actual analysis. It pretty much amounts to an emasculating orgy of self pity written exclusively to indulge the people who already buy in to their world view, rather than convince anyone on the fence.
I think the “noise” generated from Twitter overshadowed the fact that Richard is one of the few really interesting thinkers on the “right” currently. Hoping to see more opportunities to convey these ideas to a wider audience now that the Twitter presence is reduced.
I think that "heterodox" connotes mainstream credentials but not mainstream views. That describes me in economics. It describes Richard in foreign policy, does it not?
That describes me too, but there is or ought to be too wide a variety of non-mainstream views for "heterodox," which to me implies difference along a fairly small number of dimensions from a pretty monolithic "orthodoxy."
This is the same basic reason why I really abhor being called a "contrarian". In my head, I really don't feel like I'm motivated by a primal urge to look at what the majority of people are saying and say the exact opposite. Like you, I believe the majority is correct on certain issues (evolution is true, Covid vaccines reduce the risk of death etc.) and incorrect on others (there are no differences between male and female brains, discrimination is the sole explanation behind the underrepresentation of women in STEM etc.).
I suspect that the people tossing around the label "contrarian" are so deeply steeped in social conformity that the only reason they can conceive of someone endorsing a particularly worldview is BECAUSE of conformism (or its opposite). The idea of a person endorsing a worldview because they sincerely believe it's true (without regard for how popular it is) seems not to occur to them.
Absolutely. But when a person expresses a sentiment which goes against the grain, I don't think one's knee-jerk assumption should be that they're motivated by contrarianism.
There is something to be said about the psychology of average right-wing "dissident." This is someone who can instinctively tell something is amiss about what the MSM says, but lacks any level of intellectual seriousness. Conspiracy theories are appealing, because conspiracy theories explain why the media lies and why bad things are happening without requiring any work. They appeal deeply to the low IQ. Watching strange documentaries and listening to podcasts by grifters substitutes for actually reading arguments and counterarguments and thinking.
I always wondered why conspiracy theorists never apply any of their (often well-placed) skepticism toward their own theories. You know about all of these studies showing how dangerous vaccines are, but why do you have no skepticism of ivermectin? But I realized, the truth is not the point. The truth is not the point for most people, after all. Conspiracy theorizing, reflexive contrarianness, these fill a certain psychological need.
You just keep telling yourself that. Yeah, it’s all about low IQ conspiracy theorists. That’s the ticket!
Well, this comments section certainly seems to bolster his point.
You’ve got a ton of people so committed to the correct point that lockdowns were unnecessary and authoritarian that they’ve decided the entire medical establishment is engaged in a conspiracy about the lethality of covid and effectiveness of vaccines.
Give me a break. You people are as loony as the leftists crying about “corporate medicine” and “profiting off of sickness”.
There was a concerted effort -- from corporate media outlets, social media companies, Democratic politicians, and the medical establishment -- to make it verboten to point out that COVID posed essentially zero risk of death to the majority of people. You don't have to believe in a conspiracy to understand this; in most cases "conspiracies" are just people acting according to their social and financial incentives.
COVID had a 5% mortality rate when it first broke onto the scene! Then it had a 2% mortality rate, which is still enormous!
It was a completely different virus. Even young, healthy people who caught the first round of it described it as the sickest they'd been in their life, and said for months after that it hurt to breath, and they could barely walk up a flight of stairs.
"Essentially" and "majority" are lifting your entire worldview. Depending on who you ask (especially anti-vaxxers), "essentially zero" risk of death could be as high as 5%, and "the majority" literally could be 50.1% of people. That's a lot of harm to be reduced.
Fair enough, but come on, dissenting from Wokeism can very well mean the end of one's employment, and indeed employability, in many precincts of the educated elite.
Sure it's not the Gulag, or even the Inquisition, but it's at least McCarthyism. but aren't unwoke just a tiny bit entitled to use "dissident"-type language to describe their beliefs?
Well, one of my main themes is the importance of freedom of association, and how evil civil rights laws are for taking that away from people. So no, I don’t consider people not wanting to associate with others to be a restriction on freedom.
I respect the principled stance, but I simply don't think that "not wanting to associate with others" adequately captures the difference in magnitude of all the following scenarios:
* not wanting to patronize the local fundamentalist Christian / queer BIPOC indie bookstore because you don't like their beliefs
* having all your books removed from Amazon because Amazon doesn't like your beliefs
* choosing not to visit the woke doctor because you don't like xir stance on "trans kids"
* not being able to practice as a doctor because you refuse to mouth the woke dogma on "trans kids"
I guess my point is that the monopolistic power of Big Tech or woke professional / credentialing associations seems to go above and beyond the 'freedom of association' of individual citizens or even individual groups / corporations of citizens.
> aren't unwoke just a tiny bit entitled to use "dissident"-type language to describe their beliefs?
I agree that the language is technically accurate, but it comes across a lot differently when someone self-describes as a dissident, compared to when someone else describes them with that label.
Granted, you could probably say the same about any other adjective with positive connotations.
This brings to mind something Tony Judt pointed out when talking about dissident intellectuals and artists in the USSR and other communist countries: Persecution was no guarantee of quality. Lots of the writers who struggled along in the underground publishing circles of Eastern Europe, lauded as heroes in the West, faded from view after 1989 because they just weren't particularly talented or interesting artists or thinkers. Many could have got out earlier but chose not to, preferring to be oppressed, as at least it made their work notable. I think many modern "dissident" authors are clamouring for a bit of that oppression chic, because on the market for content, it can substitute for quality or originality. But, as you pointed out, modern-day USA isn't exactly communist Poland as far as freedom of speech goes. That's not to say there aren't real censorship problems to discuss, but then discuss them, don't just poke the bear then try to get famous off getting lightly mauled.
1. This article seems a little at odds with your essay on How to Think about the Current Thing. In that you outlined why relying on heuristics is important when we have limited time to form opinions. You wrote "I would argue that a probabilistic approach suggests that we should be anti-current thing." But in this article you say that using anti-liberal heuristics "sometimes works, but it’s not the best way to go through life." Is the former advice for normies, while the latter advice for those who care to read about topics?
2. “free thinker” likely won't take on now that Kanye is using that term while claiming Jews are killing black babies. Gen Z uses the term exclusively sarcastically online. The best case scenario is that you get so famous that "Hananiaism" becomes your ideological label.
Government of Canada was just fine freezing all the bank accounts of those they claimed directly or indirectly supported the Convoy. No trial or anything. No warrant.
I know it's not the point of the post but to say that "covid vaccines work" is far too simplistic a stance to be considered either right or wrong. You can make a claim that they work to prevent hospitalization, particularly among very vulnerable populations; that claim would be true. But then you can claim, as many did (and as many were banned from the public square for denying) that COVID vaccines prevent you from getting sick at all, which is clearly and obviously untrue. If you believe the latter then you probably are just room-reading, despite any illusions to the contrary, as absolutely no evidence exists in favor of that and a great deal exists against it.
People develop these blind spots, even when they think they're operating on the truth-value of claims, out of self-preservation. There are some buttons you just know not to press. For months, in fact a couple of years, the no-questions-asked, miracle-cure-all efficacy of the mRNA vaccines was one of these things. If you or anyone else still holds *that* definition of "covid vaccines work" to be true, I bet this is a factor, that it remains - vestigial - in their mind that it's unthinkable to dissent, even though now the medical establishment is quietly admitting that they "work" only in a qualified, limited way.
Your overall point, however, is a very good one, and that right wingers like to use the "oh, we poor benighted heretics are just oppressed by leftists at every turn, no wonder we can't do anything" line as cope is 100% true. To take the 2020 election as an example: we could have seen what was happening in Georgia, with the liberalization of election laws, and the very impressive GOTV operation run by the Democrats, and tried to fight fire with fire. No, much easier instead to say that there were fake ballots and fraud and everything, rather than do any actual work. A bunch of self-owns from Trump about mail-in ballots didn't help; the complete absence of any kind of GOTV operation from the Republicans did for the rest. Rather than reflect on that and do the work, much easier just to call yourself a heretic and a secret king and say that elections don't matter because they're all rigged and democracy is stupid anyway.
Most people care about covid because of the risk of serious hospitalization or death. That’s the whole reason we treated covid seriously in the first place. The vaccines therefore “work” when it comes to the most important thing we care about, and saved millions of lives. If you had a treatment for cancer that stopped you from dying from the disease or getting seriously ill we would say the treatment “works” regardless of whether it eliminated all traces of cancer in the body.
The risk of serious hospitalization or death was actually minimal. In line with what happens every single year with the flu. Just because it was hyped to the skies as the new Black Death doesn’t mean it was. The sickest and oldest people, genuinely at risk, still had a 99.85 chance of survival. It was never comparable to a cancer diagnosis. “The vaccine saved millions of lives” is pure assertion. You may believe it, but it’s not based on data.
Most people *now* care about them for that reason. I don't know where you lived during the vaccine rollout, but here in the US we were all locked down, masked, distanced, and unable to gather. Consequently death was a concern, but not the main one. Rather, the vaccines were sold to the public as a prerequisite of a return to normalcy. Specifically: public figures, up to and including Fauci, said the vaccines conferred protection not just against hospitalization, but infection as a whole. They also said we'd be allowed outside again if we took them. They also said not being vaccinated would cause the hospital system to be overloaded. Retconning this to be about death and "serious" hospitalization might help you avoid asking some tough questions of yourself about your credulity, but it utterly and completely fails even cursory examination.
Yeah you seem to be throwing a lot of stuff together there. Fauci also said the vaccine would save lives and it did. I heavily criticize masks and lockdowns, I think they are war crimes. It doesn’t change the fact that the vaccine works. I’m not trying to win an argument with Fauci.
How, by accurately explaining how vaccines were regarded by the public health authorities, and communicated thus to yhr public, am *I* throwing things together? They threw it together; I just chose to remember it, while you've chosen to remember only the bit that makes your prior judgment correct. You're simply wrong when you say that the motivation for mass vaccination was solely - in fact even primarily - to prevent death and "serious" hospitalization. They were primarily to allow us to return to normal social life by preventing transmission and infection - a *byproduct* of which is the absence of death and hospitalization. You can keep being wrong about this, I don't care, but I'm not the one who was wrong about what the vaccines do and what they were for. That was the public health establishment.
It was obviously both. Vaccines were supposed to save lives and allow us to get back to normal. The reason most people cared about covid in the first place, the reason they got all this power in the first place, was because of the worst effects of the disease.
As for the public health community, they were right about some things and wrong about many others. And I agree that they are bad people who lie and support evil policies and should be opposed. Why quibble over whether the vaccine works or not? It simply does by any reasonable definition of the term.
We know each others' viewpoints on what the vaccines were touted as to the public now, and I am content to agree to disagree on that.
The reason, however, to quibble over the definitions that *the people empowered to govern public health* are using is this: at that point, at the point of public health expenditure, of vaccine mandates, and of the risk (however slight) of vaccine injury, these definitions matter a hell of a lot. The efficacy of the vaccine at preventing transmission matters a hell of a lot. It's not to be right on the internet. It's to ensure that we as a free people have the right to demand transparency over what these vaccines do and do not do, and make a cost-benefit analysis based on *that*, *at the time of dose*, not what has been retconned into being eighteen months later.
If, in March 2021, I said that "the outcome of the vaccine rollout is that in my heavily-vaccinated county, almost many people will die from COVID in January 2022 as did in January 2021, and this is after January 2021 took out a lot of the most vulnerable", I would have been accused of denying the efficacy of the vaccines and I would have been removed from the internet. Yet this is exactly what happened. How can the definition *not* matter - and how, given this, can the definition that the public health authorities gave be anything but *by your own standards* massively unreasonable?
Once again: I remember. You don't. Your beef is with the public health authorities, not me.
Works for some, damages others. The jury is still out whether they were a net benefit. Since we don’t have anything like impartiality these days, I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
It needs to be repeated that on any mainstream platform, saying the above until very recently would have gotten you flagged for misinformation and very possibly banned, and that this directive came (as Alex Berenson has shown during legal discovery) from the White House.
But sure, let's not quibble over definitions of things like "vaccine" and "work." I'm sure the very same people who governed the roll-out for this one have the appropriate level of hubris to be a wee bit more cautious next time!
There were so many lies at this point you have to be willfully ignorant not to see them
If we're talking about public health authorities, I'd actually prefer if they were lying, because the alternative is they really, really don't know what they're doing.
"They also seem discerning enough to be able to tell the difference between establishment positions that are correct (covid vaccines are good) and those that are wrong (systemic racism)."
I think about this regarding healthcare: I've written a lot about the ways that the FDA especially is bad and impedes the development of new treatments (something you talked to my wife about: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/sorting-through-498000-clinical-trials). There are also too many restrictions on who becomes doctors and how. I can go through some other ways healthcare provision is not great, and, considering that healthcare spending is close to 20% of GDP and touches the lives of almost everyone, the issue is important.
At the same time, however, I don't identify as a radical healthcare skeptic: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/11/on-not-being-a-radical-medicine-skeptic-and-the-dangers-of-doctor-by-internet/. It is in fact good and useful to try to figure out what works and what doesn't, and most potential treatments don't work. People who claim homeopathy works are wrong. I've gotten a lot of what might be called "interesting" emails and comments from people who are like: "Right on, man!" about the FDA, but who then have non-functional or inaccurate views about doctors or medicine.
For most people it seems like tribal affiliation > truth: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/11/10/personal-epistemology-free-speech-and-tech-companies/. The motivated reasoning in the rest of this comments section is consistent with that.
"Sometimes the establishment is right and kooks on the internet are wrong! In fact, that’s the right assumption when it comes to most things."
That is exactly right! Therefore it is usefull to use labels such as "heterodox", so we can lower our initial credence in anything that goes against the establishment.
Of course we should then listen and evaluate each argumet on its merits, and this would result in updating our belief, but the result of the update is different if the prior belief was different (i.e. a Bayesian update).
I agree with this piece, and aspire to a similar ideal of independent thinking. And yet, at a certain point in my life I came to realize that I am, constitutionally speaking, an intuitive contrarian. If everyone likes something, my first instinct is to dislike it. If everyone does something, my first instinct is to do something else. And if everyone thinks something, my first instinct is to assume they are all wrong.
This is merely an initial instinct, which with the passage of time I've gotten better at dismissing where it might cause needless hassle (e.g., rejecting fashion norms) or where it would simply lead me into error. Nevertheless, having a bit of intuitive contrarianism can be helpful, because it means that adopting either side of an issue bears costs:
1. adopting the popular position bears an intuitive emotional cost
2. being an intuitive contrarian doesn't exempt one from all the usual costs of unpopular opinions (social censure, ostracism, etc.)
Since both sides bear costs, it can be hoped that one will choose more carefully. (Moreover, if we look at truth-finding as a social, dialogic process, then having some interlocutors predisposed to take up contrary positions is useful, cf Sperber & Mercier's *Enigma of Reason*.)
The vaccines work really, really well... to line the pockets of pharma execs.
The problem is that the side relying on solemn debates about ideas is strictly outmatched by the side relying on tribal loyalty and fanaticism.
It's important for at least some influential elites to be aware of what the truth actually is, to the extent 'truth' can be discerned. But on a practical level, the only force capable of turning back a movement like Wokeism is an equally (or even more) intolerant and fanatical opposing movement. Stated differently, if you get what you want out of American politics, it'll be thanks to the legions of MAGA Trump cultists and devoted 'Christo-Fascists' rather than some sort of New Enlightenment rejection of leftism.
I had similar thoughts. RH says the Left “wants it more”, which suggests idealism, but he also said on Twitter that “liberalism has been crazy for 60 years” (he used busing as an example). Granted not all progressives/Leftists are fanatics, but their idealism manifests itself in unrealistic statist goals and is anti-liberty. To oppose them requires real dedication. There aren’t any GULAGS, but there are risks.