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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
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Feb 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The debate over Covid NPIs is mystifying to me at this point. I was a huge supporter of NPIs in 2020. I made a website about them. And yet now it's clear that NPIs just cannot contain Omicron. And we have effective vaccines. So what is the debate about, exactly?
Is it just a thing where we got used to shouting for NPIs for so long that people are just stuck in that mode, kind of like people are still stuck bathing in hand sanitizer years after it became clear that surfaces weren't a significant vector of transmission?
Or is it a thing where people are using calls for NPIs as a way to vent their frustration at the people whose resistance to NPIs hurt our pandem control efforts back in 2020?

Or maybe to just vent their incohate rage at the whole pandemic?
We have a variant that's too contagious for any country (yes, even China) to contain.

We have an effective vaccine.

The NPI dream is over, folks. Pack it in and go home. I did.

(end)

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 4
I've unpaywalled my post "Wokeness as old-time American religion" -- the second in my series of posts about wokeness.

In this one, I argue that wokeness is actually an American ideology that has existed for centuries and reemerges again and again.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…
In the first section of the post, I argue:

* Critical race theory is part of wokeness, but is not central to the movement, which is grassroots in nature

* The key thinkers are Black American writers, not the Frankfurt School or any European leftists
In the second section, I argue (as have many others) that wokeness has Protestant Christian roots, and that Congregationalist abolitionism was the original version of wokeness.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 4
The Biden Boom rolls on, powering right through Omicron
Time to go back and find all those tweets from a month ago predicting imminent economic collapse, and screenshot them wryly 😃
YOU JUST CAN'T KEEP THIS ECONOMY DOWN
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Feb 2
How do you say the name of that grocery store?
Wow, the results have see-sawed back and forth several times since I posted the poll
I'm a Ranch 99 man myself, sounds more like Route 66
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 31
I've unpaywalled my post "Wokeness as respect redistribution".

It was the first of a series of posts I've been writing about woke culture's place and purpose in American society. Check it out!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…
The thesis of this piece is that by 2013, American society had become a supersaturated solution of disrespect -- an increasingly diverse populace where White was still equated with normal, an increasingly gender-equal economy where women still got harassed at work, etc.
Something like wokeness had to happen, because our country couldn't continue that way. You can't have a country that only respects a small subset of its population.

Wokeness, I argue, can be seen as a leveling movement: A socialism of respect.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 29
@popedum The U.S. elite becomes integrated through universities; these are where the top 1/3 of the economic pyramid learn to become one people (what the army did for the working class during WW2 and the Civil War but not usually)...
@popedum At these universities, elite Americans need something to unite them into one people. Perhaps 150 years ago, rigid ideological and identitarian conformity would have been enforced at universities, but certainly not now, and not for a very long time...
@popedum Instead, American universities teach young elite Americans to find unity in diversity -- to embrace their particular identities (racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic) while finding unity in the fact that they all value these same things.
Read 10 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 28
When I was a kid, we had domestic terrorists killing hundreds of people and bombing the Olympics. We had 2200 murders in NYC in one year. We had 30,000 nukes pointed at us, on hair-trigger alert.

And this is what we now remember as a golden age.

So...maybe we'll be ok.
Three times as many people died in one single riot when I was a kid as died in an entire summer of nationwide George Floyd protests.

3x people died in one right-wing terrorist attack in the 90s than rightists killed during Trump's entire term in office.
The government laid siege to a cult just down the road from the town where I grew up. The cult burned down and like 80 people were killed.

Some guy stole a tank and rampaged through Los Angeles.

And it was just...stuff we saw on the news.
Read 4 tweets

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