By no stretch of the imagination am I a great writer. On a very good day, I can pass muster as a good one. But, except on a very bad day, I am a competent writer.

... By "competent" I mean that I can express in writing what I am seeking to convey, so that the reader can both understand my point, and not be jarred by irrelevancies and malapropisms, or bewildered by a faulty structure.

The right thing to do about Covid was nothing, and that was precisely the problem.

Doing nothing is very difficult.

... Where a man or woman was unwell, of course it was right to tend to that man or woman

But that wasn't "doing something about Covid". That was doing something about an ill man or woman.

(h/t @Medical_Nemesis).

One point that separates the Greek and Roman reactions to the rise of Christianity is the specific Roman concern that, as citizens of the Empire became Christians, the Roman gods would put an end to Roman greatness to revenge their abandoment.

... This concern—which we know from Christian, rather than pagan sources—is most famously addressed in St Augustine's 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘎𝘰𝘥, written as a reponse to the allegation that the sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 was a punishment from the old gods.

There is no sharper break in the history of Western literature than that caused by the First World War.

What disappeared in those years, I think, was the ability to believe with any confidence in 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘰, whose presence had been central to texts from Homer onwards.

... In this sense, even the break beween pagan and Christian letters, in late antiquity, seems to me less acute. The terms of heroism change radically, but the saint is no less a hero than the warrior or statesman.

As a teacher, there is a specific, and entirely novel, disgust one feels at correcting work that has been AI-generated.

... It is not disgust at the student's laziness (there have always been lazy students) or at the banality of the content (students have always written banal essays).

Indeed, one longs for such human failings as sloth and stupidity.

Why is there so much more attention granted in the West to the war in Gaza than, for instance, the war in Sudan?

... This by now a hoary sort of question, and standard answers involve—largely depending on the answerer's team—invocations of anti-Semitism, or of Western countries' funding of the Israeli military.

Every family living under the same roof, every household, is a sort of ecology, whereby its members carry out the difficult task of living together.

... All of these ecologies are flawed and fragile, because every member of every household is flawed and fragile.

We know that Covid lockdowns spoke very deeply to the logic of our times, because their embrace was so close to universal, and their repudiation after the fact has been so feeble.

... Lockdowns were implemented on all five continents, and implemented with equal zest by democratic and authoritarian regimes.

Lord Macaulay on 'The Fairie Queene' -

"Spenser himself, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting.

... "It was in vain that he lavished the riches of his mind on the House of Pride and the House of Temperance. One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the Fairy Queen.

...

People become specialists because they love their speciality, and are most at home in a little world that revolves around it.

Put them in charge, and they will then want the whole world to revolve around their speciality. The war specialists love wars. Put them in charge, and they will attempt to keep the world in a state of permanent war.

In a strange way, those who adhere to a radical rejection of the conformity created by central modern institutions could almost have embraced the Covid lockdowns, even though the lockdowns were a product of those institutions.

... Schools and offices, which mould the mind to conformity, were emptied out.

Hospitals, which do the same to the body, were (paradoxically) also emptied.

I recently read on here the acute observation that (to paraphrase): "no one is ever described as 𝘀𝗵𝘆 anymore".

It may be worth listing in clusters some other adjectives that have faded from the common vocabulary of personality description. With "shy" we can group "timid", "quiet", "bashful", "modest", "retiring".

Another cluster, pointing in the opposite direction: "vain", "haughty", "supercilious", "proud".

This👇 article left me uncertain as to the validity of the entire concept of "scientific censorship".

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… The chief difficulty (which, in fairness, the authors acknowledge at some length) is that gatekeeping is fundamental to the practice of institutional science.

It's a mistake to think that belated reports on the harms of Covid lockdowns constitute or lay the ground for a tacit admission that lockdowns were a mistake. While it is easy to find deranged statements from the height of lockdown-fever denying that lockdowns were harmful at all, that view was never the mainstream consensus.

The war between Israel and Hamas, like several wars fought by Western powers in my lifetime is unconventional, in that, in an obvious sense, one side is already 𝘱𝘳𝘦-𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥.

(h/t @thephilippics) I mean that there is not the slightest possibility that this war will end with the IDF surrendering to Hamas after repeated combat defeats, and Hamas then marching in to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in order to assume control of all of the Holy Land.

When Covid emerged, the subject-specific expertise of infectious disease epidemiologists should have enabled them to see two things more clearly and earlier than anyone else:

(1) There is going to be a global pandemic.

(2) There's not a hell of a lot anyone can do about it. There's no lack of infectious disease epidemiologists who said (1), and if you look long and hard enough you can find some who said (2).

Some remarks on Covid and Sweden.

It is hopefully incontrovertible that Sweden adopted a different approach to Covid than most other countries. What matters here isn't that there were few mandated restrictions.

On that head, as @MaxFromMax has written, a contrast with Japan is instructive. Japan had no mandates, and yet installed a suffocating culture of disease prevention.

https://t.co/3c9WvFUswHarchive.ph/neUIX

That apocryphal Wilde / Shaw / Churchill quote about how "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization In between" captures something profound about the US.

quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/07/bar… Comparing with Europe (where I've lived most of my life), I feel in the US (where I'm from) a lack of 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳𝘴 between untamed nature and industrial / post-industrial modernity.

I'm trying to understand why the lab leak / gain of function story gets something of a free pass from the Covid disinformation folx. The usual pattern has been:

- Scream and yell that The Science says x and that everyone who thinks otherwise is a monster.

- As x fails to materialize, completely drop all dicussion of the matter.

This article by @devisridhar lacks internal consistency.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/… On the one hand, Pr Sridhar positions scientists as doing nothing more than providing technical, subject-specific guidance.

"What is most likely to happen if we mandate masks, open gymns, and close schools?", vel sim.

The “pro-natalist” argument made on the basis of the need to replace or grow current populations, and the “anti-natalist” argument made on the basis of the need to protect the planet from human depredations, are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, it is put forth that the desires and decisions of families must be determined by the knowledge and projects of scientific experts, aiming at the successful management of large systems.

It is the biopolitical rule of The Science.