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.

There is an inherent tension, a mixing of messages, in the mainstreaming of what were once underground and condemned erotic tastes and practices. On the one hand, mainstreaming has been formulated as the celebration of transgression.

Indulgence of these desires was dangerous and disturbing, and that danger and disturbance were now themselves to be a subject of excitement for the culture at large.

Orwell made the acute observation that Dickens never much liked work.

Of course, Dickens himself worked like a demon, and he gestures often towards the superiority of hard, honest work over indolence. But, as Orwell points out, Dickens's ideal happy ending still involved the hero becoming independently wealthy, marrying, and retiring to a small country house, to putter about and raise rosy-faced children.

"Most men are erotically attracted to women, and vice versa. But some men are erotically attracted to other men, and some women are erotically attracted to other women. Then there are men who think or claim to think they are women, and vice versa... "Then there are both men and women who think or claim to think they are neither men nor women. Then there are people with ugly haircuts.

"These facts must be celebrated for a whole month every year.

I don’t exactly subscribe to Durkheim’s formula that “religion is society”, but I believe there is profound truth in it.

(With thanks to @LitStarling for discussion of this). Durkheim meant, in the first instance, that, as the invisible, transcendental, omnipresent, law-giving reality that is ever among us is society, religion is another word for that, not a different thing.

"We just didn't know" has become a standard element of discourse for those now willing to concede that the Covid response may have been rather excessive, but who still wish to argue that it was justifiable, or at least excusable, as it happened. And the standard response is to point out that anyone who looked into the matter 𝘥𝘪𝘥 know from very early after Covid's public emergence where most of the death and severe disease would fall

...

From the 'Historia Monachorum', an account of a visit by Palestinian monks to the hermits of Egypt in AD 394 -

"And we saw another old man in the desert of Antionöus, the metropolis of the Thebaid, Elias by name, now 100 years old ..."

imperium.ahlfeldt.se/places/22144 "He was famous for having spent 70 years in that terrifying desert ... His whole body now shook, as he was in the grip of old age ... In his old age, he ate three ounces of bread in the evening and three olives. But when he was young, he used always to eat only once a week".

For so many reasons, in the contemporary West, it is particularly difficult to be between the ages of - roughly - 13 and 17, and to raise children between those ages.

The "invention of the teenager" has been rough on all concerned. So many of us lack good maps for navigating the cross-currents of childhood's end and adulthood's beginning.

https://twitter.com/DanielHadas2/status/1582673085378854913?s=20