I agree that a lot of conservative writers undergo "audience capture" and end up pandering to the baser instincts of their readership. But I think one could read the statement āIām attracted to [some hot button culture war issue] because you can lose your livelihood for speaking out on it.ā as an observation about the general state of the culture, not a statement about the specific writer saying that and his position.
Is a successful conservative writer going to lose his livelihood for arguing that sexism is not the primary cause of the underrepresentation of women in STEM? No, of course not: expressing sentiments like that is exactly what's expected of him. Could a random guy not making a living by expressing anti-woke opinions lose his livelihood for doing that? Well, yeah, his name was James Damore.
Just because it isn't brave for anti-woke writers and journalists to tell their audiences exactly what they want to hear, doesn't mean it isn't brave for ANYONE to express anti-woke opinions.
Hmmm. I subscribe precisely because you often say really interesting things I disagree with. Makes me think. There are hopefully enough of us that you keep doing this.
I donāt buy the brave Liz Cheney story, however. Sheās going to clean up raising money as the ābrave Liz Cheneyā and have a sweet niche running her NGO and being on TV a lot. Much better than having to try to wrangle MTG into voting the right way in the House. And, miraculously, the left has forgiven her for being a Cheney and on the wrong side of the Iraq war. Normally they donāt forgive stuff like that so easily. So she will get to go to better parties in DC and NY, where people will tell her she is brave. So much more fun than some angry Wyoming rancher demanding she alienate the nice people in DC by representing him on some toxic issue. I think she took the easy way out.
I sort of sympathize with Hanania's point, but I think I still end up agreeing with you.
One reason why it's instinctively tough to think of her as "brave" is that she comes across as so "establishment". If Rand Paul, for example, is ever fired from Congress for a stand like hers, I imagine it will be easier to think of him as "brave".
It's also worth remembering that she was only in elected office for 6 years. She might not have enjoyed it that much, and especially didn't enjoy it in the Trump era, or enjoy being part of the Loser Party, so she was ready for an exit.
She wasn't ever going to be President, or have real power to pass truly important legislation (as opposed to hammering out details over bringing home pork in various shady budget deals). She could have been Speaker, but I don't think being the House leader of the less-popular party in a polarized polity is necessarily all that enjoyable a job if you don't love the sausage-making and grandstanding for idiotic ideas you don't believe in. Being a SCOTUS justice, for example, is probably a lot more fun.
I think Rand Paul is absolutely brave, even if I usually disagree with him. He has many times taken stances that go against the party, fighting against the excesses of the Patriot Act and trying to prevent Drone tactics among other things. You can tell from how he talks and how he votes that he really believes in his moral framework and he won't be persuaded to go along with the crowd just because of the peer pressure. At the same time, each stand he takes against the party is less brave than the first because it just adds to his political brand. Just like it's not "brave" for DeSantis to criticize the media since this is exactly the kind of thing that his supporters love and no one on either side of the political aisle ever changed their vote because you were mean to a journalist (they have always been only slightly less hated than lawyers).
The idea that Cheney was tired of politics and just wanted to give up is preposterous. Her entire social network is built around conservative politics and she has destroyed that along with her career. If she wanted to quit she could have just quit and maintained her status in the GOP as a tough, gun-slinging Cheney. If she wanted liberals to like her she could have branded herself that way when she first entered politics. She absolutely was on the presidential track, more so than many of the people who are running today, and as the third ranking Republican how could she not be involved with passing important legislation? This woman wants to be in the game so bad she destroyed her relationship with her own sister to get elected. After doing that you think she just got bored? Which is why she spent what remained of her time in office putting in extra work for the Jan 6th commission when she could have just phoned it in and worked to line up her next gig? There is no logical way to explain what she did except as a principled stand that she knew would make her life worse.
As for Cheney, I do think she really disliked Trump. I just don't think this was as self-sacrificing a move as you present. It disrupted her life some, but she has likely ended up happier, and there are numerous benefits to doing what she did.
1. When I say she would never pass important legislation, I mean that, first of all, Congress hardly ever passes truly important legislation. It has ceded most of its authority to the Executive and Judicial branches when it comes to deciding important national questions. Yes, on some level, deciding on a budget is important, fortunes can be made based on who is awarded the pork, but it's all just nudging the beast, not actually steering it.
Further, the GOP is the weaker, less popular, lower-status of the two parties. It has even less power to legislate than the Democrats do. So it's mostly resigned to alternately obstructing the Democrats' agenda and negotiating with them for a piece of the pie. Which is work that I don't think is for everyone.
2. When you say she was on the Presidential track -- I just don't buy that there's any world in which she could have won the Presidency. Not a strong enough candidate, and the GOP is starting each Presidential race with the deck stacked against it -- it needs strong candidates who bring something above and beyond "generic Republican with unpopular nepotistic associations -- but in female form!" to win.
For the same reason, I also doubt she could have won the primary. Only possible in a year with a very weak field with no clear frontrunner. Maybe she could have been a successful running mate, but as a VP candidate she'd only have a 30-40% chance of winning (which I'd estimate is the current base rate of GOP winning the Presidency). Maybe she'd be able to outcompete Nikki Haley to be the leading female VP candidate for this year's losing GOP ticket, but maybe not.
3. She wrecked her relationship with her sister, but now she has affirmed gay marriage and apparently reconciled with her sister. All of this aligns with the idea that when she actually got to that position, she realized it wasn't as great as she thought it was, the sacrifices she had made weren't worth it. The opportunity to reconcile by going out in this way was certainly a personal positive for her.
4. As for lining up her next gig, she has built a distinctive brand as a principled anti-Trump conservative. In the end, I think this might well work out better for her than being just another former GOP Congressperson playing the lobbying game. She'll probably at least enjoy it more -- getting paid to tell people what she really thinks has to be a lot more enjoyable than shilling for a lobbying firm. She will also be much more welcome in elite circles as a Trump-bashing gay marriage supporter than as a Trump supporter. She's not going to be asked to leave any trendy restaurants or Broadway performances.
Also, I imagine her husband makes good money, and her dad is rich and only has two children, so I imagine she and her children are not hurting for money. The difference between a low 7-figure lobbying income and a low-to-mid 6-figure income as a talking head is probably immaterial to her standard of living.
Agreed. She may have been brave, canāt speak to her true motives. But she certainly did a poor job. Iām thinking of the Jan 6 hearings, which were in total simply one more nothing burger.
Alsoā¦ I guess I agree with hanania that when he writes like this it does make me want to unsubscribe. But I canāt tell if itās cause I want an echo chamber or if thereās just some other quality here that is unpleasant. Canāt deny he has useful insights at times though.
Very few people who say that they want their views challenged or that they are open to multiple viewpoints are actually being honest with themselves. Humans used to only live in small communities, so weāre wired for ingroup solidarity, not to listen to opposing viewpoints (which could be seen as betraying the tribe).
A big problem I see for Republicans is that as the party increasingly becomes more populist, swapping out college-educated Romney types for working-class MAGAs, there will be a massive brain drain in the party.
Iāve spoken to Sibarium before personally and he is in fact a very intelligent guy. He has had his political views put through the wringer during the 4 years he spent at Yale, including during when the Halloween costume controversy happened, so heās used to being around people that strongly disagree with him. But I do see how people like him are dying out under the populist wave.
I purposely followed people with different viewpoints on Twitter, and it gives me emotional whiplash seeing the opposite interpretations of the same event in my timeline.
We all want to be part of a tribe, so most people who become alienated from the left are going to end up joining the right, and vice versa. Being pulled in different directions or sympathising with both sides is unpleasant/stressful.
So unpleasant. But I think it's been good for me personally. I had a lot of beliefs that I had never seriously challenged and losing my tribe forced me to challenge them. But it has been an extremely unpleasant experience.
Not sure it's been good for me; I've become more cynical and bitter than I like. Feels a lot like people who stopped believing in god: religion is comforting and provides moral guidance and a sense of belonging. It's painful to lose that, and have people you respected see you as crazy or evil, but you can't just choose to believe when you don't.
I'd prefer to find a new group to belong to, but the one I want doesn't seem to exist.
Brain drain in what sense? Education seems to select for articulate people but select against various forms of common sense, so it's not really clear that a party dominated by people who work will be worse off than one dominated by Yale-educated pseudo-intellectuals (which seems to be the fate of the Democrats at the moment). It might sound worse off, but that's not the same thing.
Educated people are more intelligent than uneducated people, irrespective of how wrong they are. Even if it's true that educated people believe a lot of obviously stupid things, that doesn't mean it isn't catastrophic for a movement to haemorrhage its intellectuals. Even if smart people are horribly wrong, they're better at organising successful movements and tend to be more persuasive than stupid people. E.g., the fact that communism has unfortunately often disproportionately appealed to smart people despite being so moronic is a big part of why it's been so successful despite being so absurd. It's not enough for a movement to be right, it also needs to be smart, and the two aren't necessarily well-correlated. Thus, gratuitously alienating smart people is a bad strategy even for a movement that's right about everything.
But this risks circularity. If you're constantly wrong about moronically obvious things then most people would say you're not smart, regardless of how large your vocabulary may be.
Communism was successful because it embraced extreme violence, which it could justify in places like Russia and China as being the same tactics of the ruling classes. Violence is very much the tactic of non-intellectuals. The communists wrote a lot of books, but the paucity of durable ideas that came out of them is testament to the fact that verbosity is not a good proxy for intelligence.
In places like America and Britain where such tactics could not be justified communism got nowhere, but that was because the uneducated classes realized that the pseudo-intellectuals weren't smart and refused to support them. Communism's outposts in the west were restricted to places full of supposedly smart people, like universities. Yet these people were so stupid that they not only believed Lenin and Stalin, but explicitly helped them by leaking secrets! And the intellectuals in government insisted on stuffing their intelligence agencies with people recruited exclusively from Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues, thus ensuring communist penetration of the highest levels of government even though it was simultaneously failing as a political movement!
The problem here then is not that communism appealed to smart people, but rather that it appealed to stupid people who had been blessed as smart by a not very smart credentialing system, compounded by the insistence of other "educated" people that only "education" can make people smart. So they ended up repeatedly hiring and promoting literal spies for the enemy.
This history is a big part of why I conclude that education at some point starts selecting against "common sense", which as someone else objected to the term, can also be rephrased as smartness.
I'm not sure if education "selects against" common sense. I think you can be educated without having much common sense however, which seems to be an increasing problem.
JK Rowling has stood up for women pretty well recently. She isn't even saying anything crazy, just standing up for what she believes and that pissed off a lot of her fans.
What she did was brave because she basically went against her entire ātribeā to speak up for what she believed in. Rowling is basically on the left on every single issue... except this one. So for her to go against the left despite being one of the left was a very brave thing. If some right-winger did the same thing, it wouldnāt be brave because most of the right-wing already has the same position.
I've wondered that really. I mean she gained three die hard fans this year in my Children. My third and fourth grader chewed through all 7 books in less than 3 months and my first grader got through the first week before we stopped him. They are currently building Harry Potter Lego in the kitchen as a reward for finishing the books.
Were there conservatives who didn't read her books before because they thought she was too liberal and have now changed their minds? That seems unlikely. The only conservatives who were staying away from her were the ones who think that she's trying to turn their children into devil worshipers and I'm sure they haven't changed their minds about her.
I'd imagine more conservatives would seek her out though, because of her views on trans people. Having someone at the front page of culture war stuff makes it so that people are more likely to pay attention to their books.
No, though the mere fact that one loses a lot of fans does not mean that they acted bravely. Though I'd agree there's a decent case to be made for Rowlings' bravery.
Well, maybe this passes a bravery test: Dr. Kathleen Stock.
"We hid in a broom cupboard: my mad day at Oxford with Kathleen Stock
It took police and three security guards to get her there ā but this week the gender-critical academic spoke at the Oxford Union. Janice Turner went with her"
I knew people who lost their jobs over refusing the jab. I'd call that brave, but Hanania would likely saying I'm mistaking bravery for stupidity. I would probably counter that things can be both, either, or neither. People can do something that is both stupid in the sense that what they're defending is false, and also brave in the sense that they're deliberately incurring a high cost for maintaining the belief.
This is true unless I'm one of their favorite writers. I'm not afraid to say the things I believe even if my readers don't believe it. For example, on a Substack called "Bentham's newsletter" I'm not afraid to defend utilitarianism and the badness of factory farming!
This is a good point; people can't distinguish bravery from agreeing with them. I remember some idiotic talking head called the 9/11 hijackers cowards. They were many things, but certainly not cowards; they gave their lives for a cause they believed in.
Truth. A lot of people also canāt distinguish the difference between their conception of evil and other peopleās. The 9/11 hijackers thought that they were going a good thing in the name of Allah, but to most people, what they were doing was evil.
The people that ran concentration camps thought they were good people helping Germans get rid of the āenemyā. But to almost everyone else, they were evil.
They also did it by murdering a lot of innocent and defenceless people who had no way of fighting back against them. So it depends on which perspective you take.
And I disagree because they were all of those things. Yes, perhaps brave to sacrifice their lives for a cause they believed in. But also cowardly because they fought for this cause by attacking defenceless and innocent civilians. I think it's nonsensical to try and categorise any human as "brave" or "cowardly" anyway. We can judge people's actions, but not their whole beings. Is a "brave person" always brave? In every moment and every action? Such a person obviously doesn't exist. Same with cowardly. No one is cowardly all the time in every action. So I would say these people showed both bravery and cowardice in their actions.
Why is attacking defenseless and innocent civilians cowardly? I agree that people can be brave sometimes and cowardly other times, though I claim that 9/11 hijackers aren't an example of that.
You came around to the right point eventually, which is that brave/cowardly is a useful framing of humans rarely, or perhaps never. Introducing distinctions like social, moral, and physical courage make a hash of the whole thing: the hijackers were physically brave, socially neutral, morally cowardly. But this is an old observation. Long ago someone pointed out that if you asked the rank-and-file of the fleet for six volunteers for a risky mission that is likely to end in death, every man would volunteer. If you asked them for volunteers for a mission that was of great importance to the country but if their involvement came out would end in utter public disgrace, you would not get your six.
ā...But running on vaccine hesitancy contributes to the issue being politically polarized, and can directly end up affecting the decisions people make. I donāt think it matters much for covid anymore, but the next time we have a pandemic, there are likely to be serious consequences of Republicans taking this path, both in terms of policy and what their voters decide to do.ā
Are you being brave by claiming the vaccine hesitancy is due purely to the Republican response vs. you know, all the lies Covid Inc pushed on the public? Or are you simply being willfully obtuse?
An anti-woke conservative taking a pro-vaccine position is absolutely brave. As he has described, his numbers go down when he does so. He sacrifices monetary rewards for something he believes in. You can believe his is both brave and wrong.
Lots of evidence the covid vaccines just donāt work. Yet they carry a risk. Itās blind trust to insist there is no trade off between the risk of the disease and the risk of the ācure.ā Itās astounding at this late hour that anyone can make a blanket endorsement of this vaccine, and tell us to just trust the medical establishment.
I donāt think your follower count going up and down proves that people like living in extreme echo chambers. Most people think you are right-wing and they are going to share you with other right-wingers. When you say something left-wing, the audience for that isnāt really there. But those are immediate short-term reactions. What is harder to spot is how many people stick with you because they appreciate quality and honesty and the ability to challenge your own sideās preconceptions. That wonāt be visible in the short-run numbers, but it is still real.
I'm sure he's not arguing that you can't make a living with quality and honesty, he's just pointing out that being radical tends to be more profitable. You can measure that by looking at the money that radical influencers make compared to their more rational alternatives. If it were only true that one or two radicals was making more money than Richard then you would have a point, but from what I've seen it's quite true that writing takes that stick to your tribe tends to make you more money than writing that doesn't.
As a republican primary voter, DeSantis stance on vaccine makes me less likely to vote for him. Covid Vaccine helps older and unhealthy individuals by reducing their likelihood of hospitalization and given 95% of seniors have taken the Covid vaccine it is just absurd what DeSantis is doing now. As a Harvard Yale educated lawyer, he is not that dumb to make the anti- vaccine argument he seems to be making. Yes, it is perfectly legitimate to raise issues about benefits of Covid vaccination for young men as the chance of Myocarditis seems to be higher for this cohort and they are least likely to be hospitalized. But for seniors and unhealthy individuals, Covid vaccine saved lives. Trump is truly brave to voice an opinion that is contrary to his most vocal base.
Few people make this distinction so bravo. Itās still a cost benefit trade off that every individual should think about carefully. Both the disease and the vaccine carry risk. Why canāt this be admitted by the pro-vaxxers?
Lot's of pro-vaxxers say that. Lot's and lot's and lot's. But the only group I'm aware of for whom the vaccine risk is higher than the disease risk is certain people who have vaccine related alergies, which is like 1% of the population. Even for kids (who aren't in that much danger from Covid), they are still many times more likely to be killed or have major health issues from the disease than the vaccine.
I can't decide whether to call Trump's position on this brave. He's the only living president to get the shot and not video it to show supporters it's safe. When he saw his base voters were turning against vaccines he stopped talking about it, even though he should have held up Operation Warp speed as his crowning achievement during the campaign. It seems he's realized that this was a mistake and now he's kind of taking a stance on this issue, which he has gotten a lot of pushback from his supporters for. But it doesn't seem like he is doing that because he wants to save lives, he just wants to be able to take credit for his political achievements. So...brave-ish? Somewhat less cowardly?
Some of the most fun I have is reading the swivel-eyed comments under Bari Weiss pieces that aren't right wing enough. These people are genuinely aggrieved when not fed exactly the views they hold. I think she's consistently quite brave in this respect.
"When I try to rack my brain for examples of writers that I think have behaved bravely recently, not many examples come to mind. According to Unz, Steve Sailer stopped saying nice things about the covid vaccine after getting flak from his readers. Thereās Yarvinās hobbits and elves piece, though Iāve more recently seen him kissing up to pro-lifers. I remember admiring Claire Lehmann for pushing back against her audience on covid issues. So it happens, but writers are so rarely willing to make their audiences mad that itās genuinely difficult to think of many clear cases. I like to give them credit and a status boost when they do."
Aren't you here just praising people for agreeing with you about vaccines or whatever other opinion you hold, thus falling into "'brave' means 'says things that I agree with?'" Or likewise when you criticize Yarvin for "kissing up to pro-lifers," the implication is that he's only doing that because of audience capture, and it couldn't possibly be because maybe he is actually changing his mind. Isn't that the same criticism as people who accuse Liz Cheney of kissing up to CNN for selfish reasons rather than genuine belief?
Personally, I don't think Liz Cheney is "brave," nor do I think she was pursuing some kind of cynical self-interested play. I just think she had TDS. She just really hates Donald Trump. It's not that complicated. She might not be in Congress anymore, but her TDS definitely did not cost her in any way that I would consider "brave." Likewise, I don't consider people saying contrarian things online to be "brave" pretty much ever. Losing some Twitter followers isn't enough of a consequence to count as "bravery." It just means you're high in disagreeableness. Good for you. Being willing to piss people off isn't praiseworthy in and of itself.
I think one factor you're missing in your perspective is that right-wing dogma is generally correct, at least at this moment in history, and truth is a factor in people's evaluation of one's statements. You'd lose Twitter followers if you started arguing that "2 + 2 = 5," but it wouldn't be because you're saying something brave and true. It would be because you're saying something stupid and false. This is probably how most people that disdain your liberal viewpoints think about them.
If you want to convince people that you're being brave and honest rather than simply contrarian for the sake of maintaining your own intellectual image, you should put more effort into convincing people that your non-rightie opinions are actually true, rather than just insulting the audience for disagreeing with them. You talk about the vaccine a lot, but you still refuse to engage with any vaccine skeptics in any substantive way that I've seen. You just insist that they're bad and stupid. That's not brave in my opinion, it's lazy. Likewise, you did write a piece about abortion, but instead of engaging with the pro-life viewpoint, you just said that it'll be bad for Republicans in elections, plus more insults and stereotyping of pro-lifers, even quoting Jessica Valenti about how dumb and bad and stupid they obviously are. Why would you expect people to respond well to that?
It's not like Sibarium is particularly gung-ho about the vaccines, either, which makes this all the weirder how much pushback he's getting. (Well, not weird - disappointing, yet inevitable.) He seems to be pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, a very sensible position that aligns with that of Trump himself.
Anecdotally, though, I do understand why DeSantis is doing what he's doing. Particularly among older voters - the kind who might actually benefit more from the vaccines than others - I see this in real life as well, just a complete revulsion to them. In my charitable moments I think, well, they're just performing this outrage less because they don't trust the vaccines and more because they don't trust the Left, and vaccines have become left-coded, and maybe it's misplaced anger against mandates... but no, I don't think that's really it, I think huge numbers of Republicans, even offline ones, have genuinely come to believe the vaccines are a net negative *at best* and actively killing people at worst.
So of course DeSantis, who has no convictions beyond "governing", is going to pander to that.
Being anti-mandate usually has a relatively robust philosophical base, either utilitarianism, or libertarianism, or on the left a belief that people shouldn't be forced to buy products from Big Pharma. Being pro-vaccine however doesn't really make sense as a position. It's like saying you're pro drugs. Vaccines, like any drug, can differ a lot in terms of when it makes sense to use them, for whom, and so on. The right decision will depend a lot on circumstance and the individual. People who call themselves "pro vaccine" don't recognize that however, and tend to simplify things down to vaccines always being perfect and taking them always being right. Although they may at some level instinctively realize it'd be a bad idea somehow, a lot of people who advertise themselves as pro vaccine struggle explain why they wouldn't take a vaccine every morning for breakfast for the rest of their life. Once you give up on cost/benefit analysis then it leads rapidly to bizarre and irrational decision making.
The description of DeSantis is strange. He achieved his current level of success by pushing back against this kind of swivel-eyed health absolutism at a time when it definitely was NOT pandering of any kind, indeed it was genuinely brave to do so. He was isolated and alone, with the world demanding to know why he wouldn't obey "expertise". He not only had convictions but stuck to them in the face of incredible pressure. Now people are realizing that this was the right thing to do, but it's entirely consistent with his past behavior to continue rejecting the beliefs of that very same "expertise" who were so wrong previously.
It's just totally bizarre to me that a man who made such unique decisions in the face of global opposition could ever be described as lacking convictions or pandering. It was the other politicians who explicitly disavowed all their prior political convictions the moment self-declared pseudo-experts told them to.
Vaccines have helped generations of people live healthy lives. Polio used to be a serious problem in America. Thousands of children were crippled by polio every year. Even FDR got polio and was forced to use a wheelchair while he was President.
But after the polio vaccine was invented, polio basically disappeared in America. Same with the smallpox vaccine. And the tuberculosis vaccine.
So while the Covid vaccine may not be that effective, itās hard to deny that vaccines have never been good for society.
Even if every word you write is true, and on balance vaccines have saved people from diseases, it still does not follow that they are without risks. It doesnāt follow that we should just assume no vaccine can harm. They can and do but weāre currently not allowed to investigate this. If the covid vaccine controversy leads to greater scientific investigation of risks, Iām all for it. Along with all those lives improved were some than were harmed. The risk of vaccination has never been zero.
Yes, I know the historical claims. I used to believe them too.
> itās hard to deny that vaccines have never been good for society.
But there's the rub. We don't actually know, do we? The COVID vaccines were sold to society with a pack of lies. Trusted public health officials manipulated the public constantly, aggressively and shamelessly. They said whatever would cause people to take shots even when they knew it wasn't true. I spent months trying to untangle the crazy things they were doing to data and logic to try and figure out what was really happening with the COVID shots, and by the end my primary conclusion was that if the authorities are telling you something about a vaccine, it's not going to be the truth. It will be rather whatever you need to hear to make you compliant.
Now, that's my perception. Still, what do you think the history books will say 50 years from now? What do you think public health authorities will say about this time? They will say the COVID vaccines were incredibly effective, saved millions of lives and so on. There won't be any mention of Omicron, side effects, the ever-falling effectiveness numbers, the false claims about transmission, the trials that inconveniently showed no difference in mortality, the approvals based on antibody levels not outcomes etc. They will write the history books and they will write themselves a victory.
If you dig in, you'll find people objecting to the standard public health narrative about the smallpox and polio vaccines. They do things like point to historical documents written at the time, which paint a very different picture to the one we're always given. I never formed much of an opinion about those older shots, but if someone tells me that they were sold dishonestly then I'll immediately believe it. That's exactly the sort of thing they would do.
Even if some of the "sales tactics" were dishonest, the vaccines obviously still worked. Or did polio just disappear by itself, magically, at the same time the vaccine was introduced?
Same with COVID vaccines. Sure perhaps some of the things politicians said about them and the way they pushed them was dishonest. But the vaccines still worked in keeping people out of hospital. And yes, every vaccine can have side effects for some people. This is a cost benefit analysis we have to make. One person dying from rare side effects versus a million saved from hospitalisation or death by COVID.
I'm too lazy to research the topic in-depth and don't have a strong opinion myself, but the perspective I've typically seen among vaccine skeptics is that vaccines came along at the same time as modern sanitation standards, and that the latter did the heavy lifting in terms of eliminating disease while the former took all the credit.
One example I've seen given is scarlet fever, a disease that is unheard of today despite having no vaccine. The Wikipedia page for the disease states that "Prevention is by frequent handwashing, not sharing personal items, and staying away from other people when sick."
Your final sentence is meant to be rhetorical flourish and not statistically accurate, I hope?
Did polio just magically disappear - nope. One obscure thing that's not well known about polio is that at about the same time the vaccine was introduced, the classification criteria for having polio was significantly revised such that far fewer cases were being classified as such. I wish I could find where I learned this, but as usual searching for anything on vaccines or public health is an uphill climb because search engines are so heavily manipulated. Anything not bookmarked will often be hard to find again. I will understand if you don't believe this, but I have no skin in the game and no reason to make anything up here.
This problem crops up with basically everything, because all claims about vaccines are statistical in nature and come from sources who desperately want you to take lots of shots. Occasionally you can notice that the claims aren't true, or contradict each other, or there's a logical fallacy involved, or you can dig through Appendix B in Technical Report 1547 and discover the data isn't being accurately summarized. But mostly you can't verify anything.
One reason to find the claim about polio classification credible is that this is the sort of thing they do all the time. Consider the COVID booster trials in which there was no difference in infection rates between boosted and not, yet these were declared a success anyway. Billions of shots were authorized and given on the grounds that the vaccines caused raised antibody levels, i.e. cart was put before the horse. We were told they "work" even though they actually didn't, because the authorities simply redefined what "work" means.
Dig in and you'll find semantic game playing like that everywhere. As you admit yourself, they are dishonest. So how can you be sure anything is obvious?
Sure, we can't personally verify every piece of information. So we have to put some level of trust somewhere, or not at all. I think the fact is that in the past there were quite a few diseases that were quite common and quite serious which have now been largely or fully eradicated. If 99.9% of medical scientists tell me this is because of vaccines(even if not exclusively, since there are other factors like sanitation), I'll take their word for it, not being a virologist or immunologist myself. I think science, on the whole, has been an honest and serious endeavour or we wouldn't be flying airplanes, splitting the atom or doing anything modern medicine does. Of course it's still fallible and I'll believe that crooked or simply incompetent scientists exist, systems aren't perfect, and politicians will lie to get what they want or simply be stupid. But I won't believe that all historical recorded data about diseases, mortality etc are doctored to favour vaccines just because someone wants us all to take shots for some nebulous reason.
Conspiracies exist, but not everything is one big conspiracy.
Most Republican governors refrained from implementing vaccine mandates and governors in Texas, Alabama, and Montana also barred others from implementing mandates. I'm not sure of any way in which the DeSantis approach differs from the standard GOP approach except that he was a lot better about marketing it. Could be wrong though, I don't know the details of how every single governor handled things.
Another thing Iāve noticed about DeSantis is that he only focuses on culture war issues. CRT, transgenderism, vaccines. Where are his economic policies? What plans does he have for revitalizing the economy? What positive culture war message can he send?
Trump at least does discuss the economy. Even though he never did bring those manufacturing jobs back, a big part of his platform was to revitalize the economy via trade protectionism and military noninterventionism.
Good point, itās not clear what heās supposed to be economically. In Congress he was a standard small-government libertarian but after being āmugged by realityā, i.e. the power of the Cathedral he looks more Jacksonian. Of course it could always be that he favors a small but powerful government in terms of economic involvement...
Should anyone care about a Presidential candidate's economic policies? It sounds like a filler question for a journalist to ask about on a slows news day.
I think every President has the same economic plan. Spend 6-12 months shepherding one piece of legislation through Congress (and in the end mostly written by Congress) that spends some money and modifies the tax code in some way that is expected to benefit the controlling party's supporters, lose control of Congress in the mid-terms, and then focus on things the executive branch can do without Congress.
The US economy is doing quite well at the moment, especially compared to peer economies like in Europe. It's probably reasonable for him to de-emphasize that. It'd be strange to talk about "revitalizing the economy" when it's already vital enough.
Someone ought to tell the voters, who are by huge margins more concerned about inflation and economic concerns then all but one cultural issue. That one issue? Abortion, where the GOP is getting smashed.
Yeah...but deciding, "I'm going to cause more people to die so that I can have a better shot at political power" isn't just an understandable political pander. It's morally abhorrent. Thomas Jefferson (possibly) said, "In matters of style swim with the current. In matters of principle stand like a rock". Life and death is a rock moment. And we know that he personally believes the vaccine is safe and effective because he got it, so it's not like he is actually making a principled stand here.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
I agree that a lot of conservative writers undergo "audience capture" and end up pandering to the baser instincts of their readership. But I think one could read the statement āIām attracted to [some hot button culture war issue] because you can lose your livelihood for speaking out on it.ā as an observation about the general state of the culture, not a statement about the specific writer saying that and his position.
Is a successful conservative writer going to lose his livelihood for arguing that sexism is not the primary cause of the underrepresentation of women in STEM? No, of course not: expressing sentiments like that is exactly what's expected of him. Could a random guy not making a living by expressing anti-woke opinions lose his livelihood for doing that? Well, yeah, his name was James Damore.
Just because it isn't brave for anti-woke writers and journalists to tell their audiences exactly what they want to hear, doesn't mean it isn't brave for ANYONE to express anti-woke opinions.
Fair point.
Hmmm. I subscribe precisely because you often say really interesting things I disagree with. Makes me think. There are hopefully enough of us that you keep doing this.
I donāt buy the brave Liz Cheney story, however. Sheās going to clean up raising money as the ābrave Liz Cheneyā and have a sweet niche running her NGO and being on TV a lot. Much better than having to try to wrangle MTG into voting the right way in the House. And, miraculously, the left has forgiven her for being a Cheney and on the wrong side of the Iraq war. Normally they donāt forgive stuff like that so easily. So she will get to go to better parties in DC and NY, where people will tell her she is brave. So much more fun than some angry Wyoming rancher demanding she alienate the nice people in DC by representing him on some toxic issue. I think she took the easy way out.
I sort of sympathize with Hanania's point, but I think I still end up agreeing with you.
One reason why it's instinctively tough to think of her as "brave" is that she comes across as so "establishment". If Rand Paul, for example, is ever fired from Congress for a stand like hers, I imagine it will be easier to think of him as "brave".
It's also worth remembering that she was only in elected office for 6 years. She might not have enjoyed it that much, and especially didn't enjoy it in the Trump era, or enjoy being part of the Loser Party, so she was ready for an exit.
She wasn't ever going to be President, or have real power to pass truly important legislation (as opposed to hammering out details over bringing home pork in various shady budget deals). She could have been Speaker, but I don't think being the House leader of the less-popular party in a polarized polity is necessarily all that enjoyable a job if you don't love the sausage-making and grandstanding for idiotic ideas you don't believe in. Being a SCOTUS justice, for example, is probably a lot more fun.
I think Rand Paul is absolutely brave, even if I usually disagree with him. He has many times taken stances that go against the party, fighting against the excesses of the Patriot Act and trying to prevent Drone tactics among other things. You can tell from how he talks and how he votes that he really believes in his moral framework and he won't be persuaded to go along with the crowd just because of the peer pressure. At the same time, each stand he takes against the party is less brave than the first because it just adds to his political brand. Just like it's not "brave" for DeSantis to criticize the media since this is exactly the kind of thing that his supporters love and no one on either side of the political aisle ever changed their vote because you were mean to a journalist (they have always been only slightly less hated than lawyers).
The idea that Cheney was tired of politics and just wanted to give up is preposterous. Her entire social network is built around conservative politics and she has destroyed that along with her career. If she wanted to quit she could have just quit and maintained her status in the GOP as a tough, gun-slinging Cheney. If she wanted liberals to like her she could have branded herself that way when she first entered politics. She absolutely was on the presidential track, more so than many of the people who are running today, and as the third ranking Republican how could she not be involved with passing important legislation? This woman wants to be in the game so bad she destroyed her relationship with her own sister to get elected. After doing that you think she just got bored? Which is why she spent what remained of her time in office putting in extra work for the Jan 6th commission when she could have just phoned it in and worked to line up her next gig? There is no logical way to explain what she did except as a principled stand that she knew would make her life worse.
I agree with you on Rand Paul.
As for Cheney, I do think she really disliked Trump. I just don't think this was as self-sacrificing a move as you present. It disrupted her life some, but she has likely ended up happier, and there are numerous benefits to doing what she did.
1. When I say she would never pass important legislation, I mean that, first of all, Congress hardly ever passes truly important legislation. It has ceded most of its authority to the Executive and Judicial branches when it comes to deciding important national questions. Yes, on some level, deciding on a budget is important, fortunes can be made based on who is awarded the pork, but it's all just nudging the beast, not actually steering it.
Further, the GOP is the weaker, less popular, lower-status of the two parties. It has even less power to legislate than the Democrats do. So it's mostly resigned to alternately obstructing the Democrats' agenda and negotiating with them for a piece of the pie. Which is work that I don't think is for everyone.
2. When you say she was on the Presidential track -- I just don't buy that there's any world in which she could have won the Presidency. Not a strong enough candidate, and the GOP is starting each Presidential race with the deck stacked against it -- it needs strong candidates who bring something above and beyond "generic Republican with unpopular nepotistic associations -- but in female form!" to win.
For the same reason, I also doubt she could have won the primary. Only possible in a year with a very weak field with no clear frontrunner. Maybe she could have been a successful running mate, but as a VP candidate she'd only have a 30-40% chance of winning (which I'd estimate is the current base rate of GOP winning the Presidency). Maybe she'd be able to outcompete Nikki Haley to be the leading female VP candidate for this year's losing GOP ticket, but maybe not.
3. She wrecked her relationship with her sister, but now she has affirmed gay marriage and apparently reconciled with her sister. All of this aligns with the idea that when she actually got to that position, she realized it wasn't as great as she thought it was, the sacrifices she had made weren't worth it. The opportunity to reconcile by going out in this way was certainly a personal positive for her.
4. As for lining up her next gig, she has built a distinctive brand as a principled anti-Trump conservative. In the end, I think this might well work out better for her than being just another former GOP Congressperson playing the lobbying game. She'll probably at least enjoy it more -- getting paid to tell people what she really thinks has to be a lot more enjoyable than shilling for a lobbying firm. She will also be much more welcome in elite circles as a Trump-bashing gay marriage supporter than as a Trump supporter. She's not going to be asked to leave any trendy restaurants or Broadway performances.
Also, I imagine her husband makes good money, and her dad is rich and only has two children, so I imagine she and her children are not hurting for money. The difference between a low 7-figure lobbying income and a low-to-mid 6-figure income as a talking head is probably immaterial to her standard of living.
Hanania touched on this: if it's rational to prefer respect and fellowship of blue team to red, what does that imply?
Agreed. She may have been brave, canāt speak to her true motives. But she certainly did a poor job. Iām thinking of the Jan 6 hearings, which were in total simply one more nothing burger.
Alsoā¦ I guess I agree with hanania that when he writes like this it does make me want to unsubscribe. But I canāt tell if itās cause I want an echo chamber or if thereās just some other quality here that is unpleasant. Canāt deny he has useful insights at times though.
Very few people who say that they want their views challenged or that they are open to multiple viewpoints are actually being honest with themselves. Humans used to only live in small communities, so weāre wired for ingroup solidarity, not to listen to opposing viewpoints (which could be seen as betraying the tribe).
A big problem I see for Republicans is that as the party increasingly becomes more populist, swapping out college-educated Romney types for working-class MAGAs, there will be a massive brain drain in the party.
Iāve spoken to Sibarium before personally and he is in fact a very intelligent guy. He has had his political views put through the wringer during the 4 years he spent at Yale, including during when the Halloween costume controversy happened, so heās used to being around people that strongly disagree with him. But I do see how people like him are dying out under the populist wave.
I purposely followed people with different viewpoints on Twitter, and it gives me emotional whiplash seeing the opposite interpretations of the same event in my timeline.
We all want to be part of a tribe, so most people who become alienated from the left are going to end up joining the right, and vice versa. Being pulled in different directions or sympathising with both sides is unpleasant/stressful.
So unpleasant. But I think it's been good for me personally. I had a lot of beliefs that I had never seriously challenged and losing my tribe forced me to challenge them. But it has been an extremely unpleasant experience.
Not sure it's been good for me; I've become more cynical and bitter than I like. Feels a lot like people who stopped believing in god: religion is comforting and provides moral guidance and a sense of belonging. It's painful to lose that, and have people you respected see you as crazy or evil, but you can't just choose to believe when you don't.
I'd prefer to find a new group to belong to, but the one I want doesn't seem to exist.
Brain drain in what sense? Education seems to select for articulate people but select against various forms of common sense, so it's not really clear that a party dominated by people who work will be worse off than one dominated by Yale-educated pseudo-intellectuals (which seems to be the fate of the Democrats at the moment). It might sound worse off, but that's not the same thing.
Educated people are more intelligent than uneducated people, irrespective of how wrong they are. Even if it's true that educated people believe a lot of obviously stupid things, that doesn't mean it isn't catastrophic for a movement to haemorrhage its intellectuals. Even if smart people are horribly wrong, they're better at organising successful movements and tend to be more persuasive than stupid people. E.g., the fact that communism has unfortunately often disproportionately appealed to smart people despite being so moronic is a big part of why it's been so successful despite being so absurd. It's not enough for a movement to be right, it also needs to be smart, and the two aren't necessarily well-correlated. Thus, gratuitously alienating smart people is a bad strategy even for a movement that's right about everything.
But this risks circularity. If you're constantly wrong about moronically obvious things then most people would say you're not smart, regardless of how large your vocabulary may be.
Communism was successful because it embraced extreme violence, which it could justify in places like Russia and China as being the same tactics of the ruling classes. Violence is very much the tactic of non-intellectuals. The communists wrote a lot of books, but the paucity of durable ideas that came out of them is testament to the fact that verbosity is not a good proxy for intelligence.
In places like America and Britain where such tactics could not be justified communism got nowhere, but that was because the uneducated classes realized that the pseudo-intellectuals weren't smart and refused to support them. Communism's outposts in the west were restricted to places full of supposedly smart people, like universities. Yet these people were so stupid that they not only believed Lenin and Stalin, but explicitly helped them by leaking secrets! And the intellectuals in government insisted on stuffing their intelligence agencies with people recruited exclusively from Oxbridge and the Ivy Leagues, thus ensuring communist penetration of the highest levels of government even though it was simultaneously failing as a political movement!
The problem here then is not that communism appealed to smart people, but rather that it appealed to stupid people who had been blessed as smart by a not very smart credentialing system, compounded by the insistence of other "educated" people that only "education" can make people smart. So they ended up repeatedly hiring and promoting literal spies for the enemy.
This history is a big part of why I conclude that education at some point starts selecting against "common sense", which as someone else objected to the term, can also be rephrased as smartness.
I'm not sure if education "selects against" common sense. I think you can be educated without having much common sense however, which seems to be an increasing problem.
"Common sense" is a phrase low-IQ people use to feel less bad about being low-IQ.
JK Rowling has stood up for women pretty well recently. She isn't even saying anything crazy, just standing up for what she believes and that pissed off a lot of her fans.
What she did was brave because she basically went against her entire ātribeā to speak up for what she believed in. Rowling is basically on the left on every single issue... except this one. So for her to go against the left despite being one of the left was a very brave thing. If some right-winger did the same thing, it wouldnāt be brave because most of the right-wing already has the same position.
She didn't lose that many fans, just a very vocal minority. The Hogwarts Legacy boycott was a disaster
I've wondered that really. I mean she gained three die hard fans this year in my Children. My third and fourth grader chewed through all 7 books in less than 3 months and my first grader got through the first week before we stopped him. They are currently building Harry Potter Lego in the kitchen as a reward for finishing the books.
Good point. That is certainly an example of political bravery.
And she's also gotten a lot of new fans.
Were there conservatives who didn't read her books before because they thought she was too liberal and have now changed their minds? That seems unlikely. The only conservatives who were staying away from her were the ones who think that she's trying to turn their children into devil worshipers and I'm sure they haven't changed their minds about her.
I'd imagine more conservatives would seek her out though, because of her views on trans people. Having someone at the front page of culture war stuff makes it so that people are more likely to pay attention to their books.
So to be brave you can only lose fans?
No, though the mere fact that one loses a lot of fans does not mean that they acted bravely. Though I'd agree there's a decent case to be made for Rowlings' bravery.
I posted a long analysis of vaccine safety earlier in 2023:
"I didn't see many smoking guns of vaccine danger"
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1651115795257372673
Glad to see it, Steve. Perhaps Ron was exaggerating a bit.
Steve also gets no end of grief from his readers any time he posts anything critical of Putinās war in Ukraine.
Well, maybe this passes a bravery test: Dr. Kathleen Stock.
"We hid in a broom cupboard: my mad day at Oxford with Kathleen Stock
It took police and three security guards to get her there ā but this week the gender-critical academic spoke at the Oxford Union. Janice Turner went with her"
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5d0fec18-ffd6-11ed-a364-04e704863f75
sometimes people try to compliment me and call me brave for being unvaccinated and resisting Trudeau
it always makes me feel sheepish because it was super easy to resist the jab when you have nothing to lose
if i had a wife/kids/mortgage and resisted the jab and lost my livelihood, that would've been brave
but people with families to support can't be afford to be brave
I knew people who lost their jobs over refusing the jab. I'd call that brave, but Hanania would likely saying I'm mistaking bravery for stupidity. I would probably counter that things can be both, either, or neither. People can do something that is both stupid in the sense that what they're defending is false, and also brave in the sense that they're deliberately incurring a high cost for maintaining the belief.
You're not only brave, you're stunning and brave. Congrats, Chris.
This is true unless I'm one of their favorite writers. I'm not afraid to say the things I believe even if my readers don't believe it. For example, on a Substack called "Bentham's newsletter" I'm not afraid to defend utilitarianism and the badness of factory farming!
This is a good point; people can't distinguish bravery from agreeing with them. I remember some idiotic talking head called the 9/11 hijackers cowards. They were many things, but certainly not cowards; they gave their lives for a cause they believed in.
Truth. A lot of people also canāt distinguish the difference between their conception of evil and other peopleās. The 9/11 hijackers thought that they were going a good thing in the name of Allah, but to most people, what they were doing was evil.
The people that ran concentration camps thought they were good people helping Germans get rid of the āenemyā. But to almost everyone else, they were evil.
If you genuinely believe that dying that way automatically gets you into heaven, how does that change things?
They also did it by murdering a lot of innocent and defenceless people who had no way of fighting back against them. So it depends on which perspective you take.
I agree they did bad things. But one can be brave and evil.
One can also be both brave and cowardly, was my point.
I don't think the example supported the point; the 9/11 hijackers were brave and also bad people. They were not cowardly.
And I disagree because they were all of those things. Yes, perhaps brave to sacrifice their lives for a cause they believed in. But also cowardly because they fought for this cause by attacking defenceless and innocent civilians. I think it's nonsensical to try and categorise any human as "brave" or "cowardly" anyway. We can judge people's actions, but not their whole beings. Is a "brave person" always brave? In every moment and every action? Such a person obviously doesn't exist. Same with cowardly. No one is cowardly all the time in every action. So I would say these people showed both bravery and cowardice in their actions.
Why is attacking defenseless and innocent civilians cowardly? I agree that people can be brave sometimes and cowardly other times, though I claim that 9/11 hijackers aren't an example of that.
You came around to the right point eventually, which is that brave/cowardly is a useful framing of humans rarely, or perhaps never. Introducing distinctions like social, moral, and physical courage make a hash of the whole thing: the hijackers were physically brave, socially neutral, morally cowardly. But this is an old observation. Long ago someone pointed out that if you asked the rank-and-file of the fleet for six volunteers for a risky mission that is likely to end in death, every man would volunteer. If you asked them for volunteers for a mission that was of great importance to the country but if their involvement came out would end in utter public disgrace, you would not get your six.
No, one can't, because 'brave' and 'cowardly' are antonyms.
ā...But running on vaccine hesitancy contributes to the issue being politically polarized, and can directly end up affecting the decisions people make. I donāt think it matters much for covid anymore, but the next time we have a pandemic, there are likely to be serious consequences of Republicans taking this path, both in terms of policy and what their voters decide to do.ā
Are you being brave by claiming the vaccine hesitancy is due purely to the Republican response vs. you know, all the lies Covid Inc pushed on the public? Or are you simply being willfully obtuse?
An anti-woke conservative taking a pro-vaccine position is absolutely brave. As he has described, his numbers go down when he does so. He sacrifices monetary rewards for something he believes in. You can believe his is both brave and wrong.
Lots of evidence the covid vaccines just donāt work. Yet they carry a risk. Itās blind trust to insist there is no trade off between the risk of the disease and the risk of the ācure.ā Itās astounding at this late hour that anyone can make a blanket endorsement of this vaccine, and tell us to just trust the medical establishment.
If you can't trust the "medical establishment", what can you trust for better info?
Obviously anyone who uses the term "holistic". Or sells supplements.
I donāt think your follower count going up and down proves that people like living in extreme echo chambers. Most people think you are right-wing and they are going to share you with other right-wingers. When you say something left-wing, the audience for that isnāt really there. But those are immediate short-term reactions. What is harder to spot is how many people stick with you because they appreciate quality and honesty and the ability to challenge your own sideās preconceptions. That wonāt be visible in the short-run numbers, but it is still real.
I'm sure he's not arguing that you can't make a living with quality and honesty, he's just pointing out that being radical tends to be more profitable. You can measure that by looking at the money that radical influencers make compared to their more rational alternatives. If it were only true that one or two radicals was making more money than Richard then you would have a point, but from what I've seen it's quite true that writing takes that stick to your tribe tends to make you more money than writing that doesn't.
As a republican primary voter, DeSantis stance on vaccine makes me less likely to vote for him. Covid Vaccine helps older and unhealthy individuals by reducing their likelihood of hospitalization and given 95% of seniors have taken the Covid vaccine it is just absurd what DeSantis is doing now. As a Harvard Yale educated lawyer, he is not that dumb to make the anti- vaccine argument he seems to be making. Yes, it is perfectly legitimate to raise issues about benefits of Covid vaccination for young men as the chance of Myocarditis seems to be higher for this cohort and they are least likely to be hospitalized. But for seniors and unhealthy individuals, Covid vaccine saved lives. Trump is truly brave to voice an opinion that is contrary to his most vocal base.
Few people make this distinction so bravo. Itās still a cost benefit trade off that every individual should think about carefully. Both the disease and the vaccine carry risk. Why canāt this be admitted by the pro-vaxxers?
Lot's of pro-vaxxers say that. Lot's and lot's and lot's. But the only group I'm aware of for whom the vaccine risk is higher than the disease risk is certain people who have vaccine related alergies, which is like 1% of the population. Even for kids (who aren't in that much danger from Covid), they are still many times more likely to be killed or have major health issues from the disease than the vaccine.
I can't decide whether to call Trump's position on this brave. He's the only living president to get the shot and not video it to show supporters it's safe. When he saw his base voters were turning against vaccines he stopped talking about it, even though he should have held up Operation Warp speed as his crowning achievement during the campaign. It seems he's realized that this was a mistake and now he's kind of taking a stance on this issue, which he has gotten a lot of pushback from his supporters for. But it doesn't seem like he is doing that because he wants to save lives, he just wants to be able to take credit for his political achievements. So...brave-ish? Somewhat less cowardly?
Some of the most fun I have is reading the swivel-eyed comments under Bari Weiss pieces that aren't right wing enough. These people are genuinely aggrieved when not fed exactly the views they hold. I think she's consistently quite brave in this respect.
"When I try to rack my brain for examples of writers that I think have behaved bravely recently, not many examples come to mind. According to Unz, Steve Sailer stopped saying nice things about the covid vaccine after getting flak from his readers. Thereās Yarvinās hobbits and elves piece, though Iāve more recently seen him kissing up to pro-lifers. I remember admiring Claire Lehmann for pushing back against her audience on covid issues. So it happens, but writers are so rarely willing to make their audiences mad that itās genuinely difficult to think of many clear cases. I like to give them credit and a status boost when they do."
Aren't you here just praising people for agreeing with you about vaccines or whatever other opinion you hold, thus falling into "'brave' means 'says things that I agree with?'" Or likewise when you criticize Yarvin for "kissing up to pro-lifers," the implication is that he's only doing that because of audience capture, and it couldn't possibly be because maybe he is actually changing his mind. Isn't that the same criticism as people who accuse Liz Cheney of kissing up to CNN for selfish reasons rather than genuine belief?
Personally, I don't think Liz Cheney is "brave," nor do I think she was pursuing some kind of cynical self-interested play. I just think she had TDS. She just really hates Donald Trump. It's not that complicated. She might not be in Congress anymore, but her TDS definitely did not cost her in any way that I would consider "brave." Likewise, I don't consider people saying contrarian things online to be "brave" pretty much ever. Losing some Twitter followers isn't enough of a consequence to count as "bravery." It just means you're high in disagreeableness. Good for you. Being willing to piss people off isn't praiseworthy in and of itself.
I think one factor you're missing in your perspective is that right-wing dogma is generally correct, at least at this moment in history, and truth is a factor in people's evaluation of one's statements. You'd lose Twitter followers if you started arguing that "2 + 2 = 5," but it wouldn't be because you're saying something brave and true. It would be because you're saying something stupid and false. This is probably how most people that disdain your liberal viewpoints think about them.
If you want to convince people that you're being brave and honest rather than simply contrarian for the sake of maintaining your own intellectual image, you should put more effort into convincing people that your non-rightie opinions are actually true, rather than just insulting the audience for disagreeing with them. You talk about the vaccine a lot, but you still refuse to engage with any vaccine skeptics in any substantive way that I've seen. You just insist that they're bad and stupid. That's not brave in my opinion, it's lazy. Likewise, you did write a piece about abortion, but instead of engaging with the pro-life viewpoint, you just said that it'll be bad for Republicans in elections, plus more insults and stereotyping of pro-lifers, even quoting Jessica Valenti about how dumb and bad and stupid they obviously are. Why would you expect people to respond well to that?
I did a long analysis of covid vaccine dangers to younger people this year: "I didn't see many smoking guns of vaccine danger:"
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1651115795257372673
There's something particularly pernicious about bravery debates https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/
It's not like Sibarium is particularly gung-ho about the vaccines, either, which makes this all the weirder how much pushback he's getting. (Well, not weird - disappointing, yet inevitable.) He seems to be pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, a very sensible position that aligns with that of Trump himself.
Anecdotally, though, I do understand why DeSantis is doing what he's doing. Particularly among older voters - the kind who might actually benefit more from the vaccines than others - I see this in real life as well, just a complete revulsion to them. In my charitable moments I think, well, they're just performing this outrage less because they don't trust the vaccines and more because they don't trust the Left, and vaccines have become left-coded, and maybe it's misplaced anger against mandates... but no, I don't think that's really it, I think huge numbers of Republicans, even offline ones, have genuinely come to believe the vaccines are a net negative *at best* and actively killing people at worst.
So of course DeSantis, who has no convictions beyond "governing", is going to pander to that.
Being anti-mandate usually has a relatively robust philosophical base, either utilitarianism, or libertarianism, or on the left a belief that people shouldn't be forced to buy products from Big Pharma. Being pro-vaccine however doesn't really make sense as a position. It's like saying you're pro drugs. Vaccines, like any drug, can differ a lot in terms of when it makes sense to use them, for whom, and so on. The right decision will depend a lot on circumstance and the individual. People who call themselves "pro vaccine" don't recognize that however, and tend to simplify things down to vaccines always being perfect and taking them always being right. Although they may at some level instinctively realize it'd be a bad idea somehow, a lot of people who advertise themselves as pro vaccine struggle explain why they wouldn't take a vaccine every morning for breakfast for the rest of their life. Once you give up on cost/benefit analysis then it leads rapidly to bizarre and irrational decision making.
The description of DeSantis is strange. He achieved his current level of success by pushing back against this kind of swivel-eyed health absolutism at a time when it definitely was NOT pandering of any kind, indeed it was genuinely brave to do so. He was isolated and alone, with the world demanding to know why he wouldn't obey "expertise". He not only had convictions but stuck to them in the face of incredible pressure. Now people are realizing that this was the right thing to do, but it's entirely consistent with his past behavior to continue rejecting the beliefs of that very same "expertise" who were so wrong previously.
It's just totally bizarre to me that a man who made such unique decisions in the face of global opposition could ever be described as lacking convictions or pandering. It was the other politicians who explicitly disavowed all their prior political convictions the moment self-declared pseudo-experts told them to.
Vaccines have helped generations of people live healthy lives. Polio used to be a serious problem in America. Thousands of children were crippled by polio every year. Even FDR got polio and was forced to use a wheelchair while he was President.
But after the polio vaccine was invented, polio basically disappeared in America. Same with the smallpox vaccine. And the tuberculosis vaccine.
So while the Covid vaccine may not be that effective, itās hard to deny that vaccines have never been good for society.
Even if every word you write is true, and on balance vaccines have saved people from diseases, it still does not follow that they are without risks. It doesnāt follow that we should just assume no vaccine can harm. They can and do but weāre currently not allowed to investigate this. If the covid vaccine controversy leads to greater scientific investigation of risks, Iām all for it. Along with all those lives improved were some than were harmed. The risk of vaccination has never been zero.
Yes, I know the historical claims. I used to believe them too.
> itās hard to deny that vaccines have never been good for society.
But there's the rub. We don't actually know, do we? The COVID vaccines were sold to society with a pack of lies. Trusted public health officials manipulated the public constantly, aggressively and shamelessly. They said whatever would cause people to take shots even when they knew it wasn't true. I spent months trying to untangle the crazy things they were doing to data and logic to try and figure out what was really happening with the COVID shots, and by the end my primary conclusion was that if the authorities are telling you something about a vaccine, it's not going to be the truth. It will be rather whatever you need to hear to make you compliant.
Now, that's my perception. Still, what do you think the history books will say 50 years from now? What do you think public health authorities will say about this time? They will say the COVID vaccines were incredibly effective, saved millions of lives and so on. There won't be any mention of Omicron, side effects, the ever-falling effectiveness numbers, the false claims about transmission, the trials that inconveniently showed no difference in mortality, the approvals based on antibody levels not outcomes etc. They will write the history books and they will write themselves a victory.
If you dig in, you'll find people objecting to the standard public health narrative about the smallpox and polio vaccines. They do things like point to historical documents written at the time, which paint a very different picture to the one we're always given. I never formed much of an opinion about those older shots, but if someone tells me that they were sold dishonestly then I'll immediately believe it. That's exactly the sort of thing they would do.
Even if some of the "sales tactics" were dishonest, the vaccines obviously still worked. Or did polio just disappear by itself, magically, at the same time the vaccine was introduced?
Same with COVID vaccines. Sure perhaps some of the things politicians said about them and the way they pushed them was dishonest. But the vaccines still worked in keeping people out of hospital. And yes, every vaccine can have side effects for some people. This is a cost benefit analysis we have to make. One person dying from rare side effects versus a million saved from hospitalisation or death by COVID.
I'm too lazy to research the topic in-depth and don't have a strong opinion myself, but the perspective I've typically seen among vaccine skeptics is that vaccines came along at the same time as modern sanitation standards, and that the latter did the heavy lifting in terms of eliminating disease while the former took all the credit.
One example I've seen given is scarlet fever, a disease that is unheard of today despite having no vaccine. The Wikipedia page for the disease states that "Prevention is by frequent handwashing, not sharing personal items, and staying away from other people when sick."
Your final sentence is meant to be rhetorical flourish and not statistically accurate, I hope?
Did polio just magically disappear - nope. One obscure thing that's not well known about polio is that at about the same time the vaccine was introduced, the classification criteria for having polio was significantly revised such that far fewer cases were being classified as such. I wish I could find where I learned this, but as usual searching for anything on vaccines or public health is an uphill climb because search engines are so heavily manipulated. Anything not bookmarked will often be hard to find again. I will understand if you don't believe this, but I have no skin in the game and no reason to make anything up here.
This problem crops up with basically everything, because all claims about vaccines are statistical in nature and come from sources who desperately want you to take lots of shots. Occasionally you can notice that the claims aren't true, or contradict each other, or there's a logical fallacy involved, or you can dig through Appendix B in Technical Report 1547 and discover the data isn't being accurately summarized. But mostly you can't verify anything.
One reason to find the claim about polio classification credible is that this is the sort of thing they do all the time. Consider the COVID booster trials in which there was no difference in infection rates between boosted and not, yet these were declared a success anyway. Billions of shots were authorized and given on the grounds that the vaccines caused raised antibody levels, i.e. cart was put before the horse. We were told they "work" even though they actually didn't, because the authorities simply redefined what "work" means.
Dig in and you'll find semantic game playing like that everywhere. As you admit yourself, they are dishonest. So how can you be sure anything is obvious?
Sure, we can't personally verify every piece of information. So we have to put some level of trust somewhere, or not at all. I think the fact is that in the past there were quite a few diseases that were quite common and quite serious which have now been largely or fully eradicated. If 99.9% of medical scientists tell me this is because of vaccines(even if not exclusively, since there are other factors like sanitation), I'll take their word for it, not being a virologist or immunologist myself. I think science, on the whole, has been an honest and serious endeavour or we wouldn't be flying airplanes, splitting the atom or doing anything modern medicine does. Of course it's still fallible and I'll believe that crooked or simply incompetent scientists exist, systems aren't perfect, and politicians will lie to get what they want or simply be stupid. But I won't believe that all historical recorded data about diseases, mortality etc are doctored to favour vaccines just because someone wants us all to take shots for some nebulous reason.
Conspiracies exist, but not everything is one big conspiracy.
But I can never be 100% sure, of course.
Most Republican governors refrained from implementing vaccine mandates and governors in Texas, Alabama, and Montana also barred others from implementing mandates. I'm not sure of any way in which the DeSantis approach differs from the standard GOP approach except that he was a lot better about marketing it. Could be wrong though, I don't know the details of how every single governor handled things.
Another thing Iāve noticed about DeSantis is that he only focuses on culture war issues. CRT, transgenderism, vaccines. Where are his economic policies? What plans does he have for revitalizing the economy? What positive culture war message can he send?
Trump at least does discuss the economy. Even though he never did bring those manufacturing jobs back, a big part of his platform was to revitalize the economy via trade protectionism and military noninterventionism.
Good point, itās not clear what heās supposed to be economically. In Congress he was a standard small-government libertarian but after being āmugged by realityā, i.e. the power of the Cathedral he looks more Jacksonian. Of course it could always be that he favors a small but powerful government in terms of economic involvement...
Trump in the streets, Paul Ryan in the sheets?
Should anyone care about a Presidential candidate's economic policies? It sounds like a filler question for a journalist to ask about on a slows news day.
I think every President has the same economic plan. Spend 6-12 months shepherding one piece of legislation through Congress (and in the end mostly written by Congress) that spends some money and modifies the tax code in some way that is expected to benefit the controlling party's supporters, lose control of Congress in the mid-terms, and then focus on things the executive branch can do without Congress.
The US economy is doing quite well at the moment, especially compared to peer economies like in Europe. It's probably reasonable for him to de-emphasize that. It'd be strange to talk about "revitalizing the economy" when it's already vital enough.
Someone ought to tell the voters, who are by huge margins more concerned about inflation and economic concerns then all but one cultural issue. That one issue? Abortion, where the GOP is getting smashed.
He's not ignoring inflation:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-federal-reserve-jerome-powell-monetary-policy-inflation-economy-cad8625
But in terms of "vitality" it seems the economy is OK. Plenty of jobs, new companies, growth.
Yeah...but deciding, "I'm going to cause more people to die so that I can have a better shot at political power" isn't just an understandable political pander. It's morally abhorrent. Thomas Jefferson (possibly) said, "In matters of style swim with the current. In matters of principle stand like a rock". Life and death is a rock moment. And we know that he personally believes the vaccine is safe and effective because he got it, so it's not like he is actually making a principled stand here.