Most of those deaths probably had a positive or null effect, since they primarily occurred in the 65+ demographic.
edit: It is interesting to contemplate the possibility that the death of so many seniors exacerbated the inflation problem. That's a lot of assets that were previously tied up in retirement accounts and real estate that suddenly flowed into the hands of middle aged people.
Seems callous and erroneous. Also ignoring increased morbidity and strain on the healthcare system. Plus that would have the opposite effect on inflation
65+ and often at the lower end of economic scale (at least in the USA). I can't imagine that much flowed. E.g., housing prices would have feel as supply outpaced demand.
For the non 65+ that died, that's a negative for the economy. Loss of productive years, etc.
There are also follow on effects. My Inlaws passed away over the last three years. It has been a huge time sink and blow to productivity this whole time.
Long Covid among the survivors is the big unknown to productivity
Additionally, if we had people sit down and think about the situation, we would have protected and isolated the elderly instead of the insipid and endless all or nothing crusade we were handed instead.
Current CDC estimate has 220k deaths among working age people (under 65). Maybe you’re not meaning to minimize that impact, but that’s sort of how your comment reads
Correct, parent comment is confused. UPS hires many seasonal employees, and even pays higher wages during the holiday season to all workers (Union and seasonal). After the holidays if the facility has need for more workers, some of the seasonal workers are offered permanent employment, after which time they become part of the Union.
If Beethoven is on that list, so is Prince. If Thomas Hardy is on that list, so is Toni Morrison. Mozart could write a 5 voice fugato, and Quincy Jones can score out an orchestration without even sitting at a piano.
There is no shortage of exceptional people changing how we think about and interact with the world. Again, it just doesn't look the same as it did in the past. You might not like them -- I really don't care for Thomas Hardy's writing and Freud is largely cast aside these days -- but that doesn't mean they aren't geniuses.
I used to read the Economist and likewise gave it up in 2021 due to the creeping politicisation and simplification of their coverage. I think this is representative of a larger illness that is pervading Western journalism, an ideological illness that has journalists viewing themselves as school marms of the hoi polloi rather than reporters and analysts of fact.
My suggestion is to peruse smart political magazines from a diversity of sources. Four I can recommend for this purpose are
https://jacobinmag.com ("democratic socialist" a la Sanders. Critical of the Democrats from the left. Frequently critiques establishment policies on numerous issues, occasionally including foreign policy.)
https://www.tabletmag.com (Jewish conservative magazine. A useful balance to my other selections in that it is Zionist.)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com (This magazine is one of the few smart conservative publications. It is critical of Republican interventionist foreign policy and free trade ideology. It is very culturally conservative.)
https://unherd.com (This British magazine doesn't have a specific orientation. It leans slightly cultural conservative, but doesn't have a big bias on other issues in my view, and even on cultural topics it publishes feminist viewpoints.)
And then, since these magazines are all fairly contra-establishment, you can wash down their flaming hot takes with a nice glass of neoliberal apologetics, by simply visiting any other newspaper of magazine, and viewing either the headlines or the opinion section--they are pretty much indistinguishable at this point anyway.
Thanks for these. Tablet and Unherd both seem interesting, though perhaps a bit more 'bloglike' and less journalistic than I'd prefer - even The American Conservative had an interesting, albeit short, article about white farmers. Obviously quite partisan though. Your tactic seems to be to collect a diverse array of opinions, whereas I'm a bit more closed minded - I'd rather find an outlet I agree with on most things, or least whose reasoning I agree with and follow, and then just stick to them.
Exactly. I loved how even in this piece he managed to sneak in some jabs at the people he doesn't like--he just didn't call them "misinformed." Progress!
This list is absurd for two reasons. First, it tunnel visions on tech companies without having the self awareness to note that most of the things it criticizes these companies for are shared by all capitalist enterprise. Just look at the list of evils committed by Amazon. Poor working conditions? Cutthroat competition? Seeking taxpayer subsidies? Manipulating the tax code to achieve a lower bill? Working closely with the government? Kowtowing to China?
How on earth are any of these things unique to Amazon or tech?
And the second flaw is resultant from Slate being a propaganda outlet for big city liberals--absolutely no mention of the campaign of Democrat supported free speech suppression that these platforms have embarked on.
The author seems bright and I'm sure he realizes this, but it is of course true that (what I assume to be) the premise of his article--that individual thriving is most important--is itself a core component of modern liberal ideology.
> The author seems bright and I'm sure he realizes this, but it is of course true that (what I assume to be) the premise of his article--that individual thriving is most important--is itself a core component of modern liberal ideology.
Yeah, exactly. Ideology is baked into pretty much everything, so when you try to get away from it, you end up just finding the ideology that's so core to you that you don't even (fully) realize what it is.
The other thing to watch out for is people who push "non-ideological" solutions. They're usually just trying to bake their own ideology into that unexamined part of your brain.
> Ideology is inescapable. To some extent, everyone is under its influence. But that does not mean that all are equally ideological
The author makes this point very plainly. The 'well it's all ideology anyway' take is reductive and uses relativism to (poorly) justify people supporting ideas that are harmful to both themselves and to society.
In the same way that acknowledging that human conflict is inevitable doesn't justify violence, the existence of ideology doesn't justify structuring one's entire life around it.
> justify people supporting ideas that are harmful to both themselves and to society.
Harmful according to whom? It's safe to assume people don't support ideas they think are harmful to themselves and society.
What irks me is that the "ideology is intrinsically bad" idea is historically firmly part of conservative ideology. One early formulation is Burke's criticism of the french revolution.
Harmful according to other ideologies conlficting in the mind of the same person.
You think murder is morally wrong. You think some govt policy is so important that when govt kills people while it is carrying out the policy, the ends justify the means. Ideology is what killed those people.
Is that a bad trolley problem where you only tell us the consequence of one side of the decision, and then use that to tell us that even thinking about taking that decision is is bad?
I'd call that a "no", actually. Or just a bad faith argument.
I left it vague so people of both sides could relate to how it fits the other side's hypocrisy. But I suppose this also allows people who are looking for a fight to imagine that it fits their own hypocrisy and get defensive.
I don't think it's an attempt to justify things as much as an attempt to question whether the author is making a real point. He suggests that we should "adopt flexible stances, mixing traditions", rather than "adopting rigid and extreme positions", but almost everyone honestly believes this is what they're doing. (I would argue that "rigid and extreme positions" is just what it looks like from the outside when someone's mixing in a tradition you don't understand.)
I could imagine someone saying that we should strive to live off of vibes, never having or acting on ideas about how the world should be, but he doesn't seem to be arguing that.
But liberal humanism /is/ an ideology and denying that gets you further from the truth. You can accept that as your ideology or you can say "actually this is just factual reality" but then you're being a closed-eyes ideologue just like the author. It's OK to be ideological because ideology is just the axioms you choose. If you think that equality is good or bad (in some specific situation like access to resources) that's an ideological stance. There's no "non ideological" position.
Of course there are better or worse ideologues (and blind ideologues tend to be the most insufferable because they believe they're non ideological but turn out to just be neoliberals), but nobody is non ideological.
> In the same way that acknowledging that human conflict is inevitable doesn't justify violence, the existence of ideology doesn't justify structuring one's entire life around it.
That analogy is pretty loaded, I think. I doubt people making it would take issue with someone deeply involved in a charitable cause and spending their life to relieve people from their issues. Likewise, I doubt people making that analogy would consider themselves deeply invested in ideology, while, in fact, almost everyone is almost inescapably embedded in a set of dominant ideologies.
> you end up just finding the ideology that's so core to you that you don't even (fully) realize what it is.
I haven't (yet) read him but I think Gramsci wrote about stuff like this in a very detailed way. From the wiki page [1] (because, again, I haven't yet read him, maybe there's a gramscian in here who can come up with better quotes):
> The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology, rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the status quo.
> Ideology is inescapable. To some extent, everyone is under its influence. But that does not mean that all are equally ideological; thinking people can adopt flexible stances, mixing traditions.
Yup. As soon as you think you're "non-ideological" at that point you're fully ensconced in ideology, because your beliefs are so invisible to you that you mistake them for reality. Zizek beats this drum a lot. He did a very entertaining documentary on the subject called The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, examining ideology through the lens of various classic films. You can see a fun excerpt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVwKjGbz60k
> Yup. As soon as you think you're "non-ideological" at that point you're fully ensconced in ideology
I don't think this is the case in every instance at all.
I think an individual can strive to scrutinise their beliefs, wrestle with their own conscience and try to come to conclusions based on scientific observation, where appropriate, as much as possible.
A person who is "non ideological" can be just that.
People are quite good at lying to themselves about how objective, rational, and scientific their thoughts & opinions are, yes. Science is itself prone to ideology. See people being attracted to beautiful, simple theories.
Well, the point of the scientific method is that it isn't prone to ideology.
If those beautiful theories don't work, then they're abandoned.
The point remains that there are people who strive to avoid cognitive biases and self delusion, see Cartesian doubt.
The claim to be non ideological doesn't always mean the person is the most ideological. It can just actually mean the person is striving to be non ideological.
The scientific method does not give an account of why a given theory must be accepted or rejected. That process is ideological - and no, Popperian Falsification isn’t used, update your understanding of this phenomenon (science) you love so much. Read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and join us in the post-1960 understanding of science.
To give you a taste: if falsification of theories is grounds for rejecting them, all theories must be rejected at all times. There are always - always - some phenomena that are not explicable with current theories. Much of the practice of normal science is in coming up with an explanation of these phenomena using the current theory, not coming up with new theories. Coming up with new theories is an extremely rare practice not done by most scientists. So how do you tell whether a given anomaly will eventually be described by the current theory, or will remain inexplicable until the formation of a new theory? You cannot. New theories also have many more unexplained phenomena when they are first articulated, since not as much work has been put into conforming observation to theory (if that last sentence seems backward to you, you probably don’t know how science is actually practiced). So what grounds does a scientist have for choosing a new anomaly-ridden theory rather than an old anomaly-ridden theory? The process is in part ideological and has nothing - I repeat - NOTHING to do with the scientific method. Emerging theories are chosen by scientists with a high risk tolerance using not a small amount of faith. And many times this bet doesn’t pan out: the theory eventually dies and considerably sets back their career prospects, as all the time they spent conforming observation to theory (again, the practice of normal science) is completely discarded.
The use of “theory” in the above paragraph is probably different from how you think of the meaning of the word. This is analogous to how new theories work: they aren’t just a refinement of previous theories, they actually explain the world in a novel way using different language, occasionally the same words with wildly different definitions (for example, Newtonian mass vs. Einsteinian mass). The author Thomas Kuhn often uses the word “paradigm” in the way I’ve used theory up above to help avoid this confusion. Incidentally, that book is why the term paradigm became popular.
People die a lot[1]. If we take the link at face value, 116 a minute. Do we save them all? If so, how? Do we start with biggest troublemakers? If so, Covid might not be THE problem to tackle[2].
> “Does it matter if someone dies as a result of being vaccinated” => No? => Pro-vax ideology.
Honest question: Does the fact that the stats say far more people die from the unvaxxed disease than the vax, bear relevance to this?
Because otherwise it seems like you could apply this to anything. "Does it matter if someone dies as a result of being seatbelted?" => No? => Pro-seatbelt ideology
Let me try an argument and you can rebut it for my own edification, I'm a younger brother so perhaps view this as an argument by a younger brother who is exploring half formed ideas and trying to engage an older brother so I can be proved wrong (my older brothers usually prove me wrong irl):
Is it ideological to say that discrete minds have equality of type?
If one then says discrete minds with equality are logically treated with equality of type. Is that not a properly basic truth?
1+1 equaling 2 can be argued against (can't evrything) but the onus is on those who argue that 1+1 equals not 2.
Is basic counting ideological? Are all 1's not the same? Would it be strange to treat a 1 as if some particular 1 does not equal 1 or is a superior 1. I think definitions of 1 would have to be tortured to do so.
I'm not saying what 1 ought to do, I'm just saying form follows function, a tree is not equal to a wheel, they do not share similar form or function.
What moral argument does one have for a particular mind to forcibly coerce another mind. What argument is there for a greater 1?
This seems like this would no longer be describing the way reality is but the way someone views it "ought" to be.
I guess one could argue that minds don't have equality on the whole, but I think the burden of proof would have to fall on the person making such a claim. Maybe through the measurements of skull shape someone has irrefutably identified a superior qualia.
> Crucially, culture selects at group level, improving the fitness of groups. Because humans organize and compete in groups, successful ideas enhance group performance; the nature of the ideas is irrelevant.
You can be aware of how ideology does sacrifice individual good for group or cultural good, and be happy with that. Being aware of a dynamic doesn't necessarily mean that you support it's implicit values too! For example I don't really think my individual happiness per say is the ultimate good, because I don't last forever, but humanity, in some form, does. It's why I try to be a 'decent human' even when nobody is looking, because a world where people don't act like me is also a shitty place to be. A combination of individual and group preference. In the %20 saints %20 freeloader and %60 status-quo split of a human population, I'd probably be in the %20 saint category.
> Though ideologies define the terms of reality, scholars calling this decontestation, this is necessarily imperfect; reality is irreducibly complex.
Also ideology is ultimately necessary, it's a model of how the world works for an individual too. Even the smartest person needs to reduce reality to a model, since no human can really accurately understand all of it.
> But that does not mean that all are equally ideological; thinking people can adopt flexible stances, mixing traditions. Given the imperfections of ideology, I prefer this approach.
You can also try not to be strongly ideological, even when preferring the group, because it makes you a stronger player 'for the group'.
I'm not sure what you were doing in the gym, but for me lifting heavy and pushing the boundaries of what I can do every single time I'm in the gym makes it fun.
It also helps if you setup regular routines to make comparison easy, for example:
day 1 - bench, curl (barbell), lat pull, tricep extension (dumbell)
This example hits alternating muscle groups so you can minimize rest in between. If I do something like this I can usually get my heart rate up as well.
This is nothing but conjecture, but my suspicion is that neurotically conscientious people are more likely to become vegan, and also more likely to be depressed and anxious.
I will say this, having known both and helped/been both. They do tend to use more of the livestock/game when eating meat than those who are separated from the process of harvesting the animal, itself. This is, of course, purely anecdotal.
I hunt and raise livestock and I eat more meat than most, but I try to be very conscious of where my meat comes from and how it was produced. People that hunt/produce have much different relationships with meat. I think the comment above meant if more of the masses knew how terrible mass produced farms and slaughterhouses were, they would be more conscious of the chain too, hopefully making their buying decisions more sustainable and ecological.
I think there would be some initial shock if we had to pull the trigger on the food we eat but eventually it would just be normal and those who enjoy meat would and those who don’t won’t. I would bet no one was squeamish at a food market several hundred years ago.
No, that’s not what sundvor says. They explicitly talk about the whole population (“everyone “), and I am pretty sure if everyone had to pull the trigger on their dinner, total meat consumption would absolutely go down, regardless of what a few hunters or farmers do.
Yep. I've only done so once, well my brother did the shooting whilst I held the rabbit down then helped prep to skin them.
Meeting the meat was also a reference to the Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy; there, the meat would kill itself. It forced the attendants higher up in the food chain to be confronted by the reality of the situation, rather than having the slice of meat simply something you get at the supermarkets in a packet.
In all seriousness, by reducing the amount of meat eaten you can avoid the worst meat factories with their horrible conditions for the animals.
I believe organic farming is far more ethical, and better for the planet as well (methane emissions) as for the consumers who are likely to be overweight.
I'll truly never understand how the automatic reply to every comment about population statistics always attacks the idea of an outlier that prevents the 100%, as if it's an all or nothing situation.
Interesting suspicion. What atypical mind states are associated with meat eating?
It would have to be a very large effect given 95‰ of the US eats meat. I think the opposite is more likely. Atypical mind states are associated with veganism and the mood disorders.
To clarify, when I said "neurotically conscientious" I was referring to two of the traits in the Big 5 personality assessment scheme--neoroticism and conscientiousness. So not an "atypical mind state" so much as an ingrained way of viewing the world.
So in response to "what personality traits would you associate with meat eaters?" I would say, closer to average levels of neuroticism and conscientiousness, and hence also closer to average levels of anxiety and depression.
Well, if you consider animal life to be valuable, it makes sense you that consider raising cattle for food similarly to how one would consider slavery today, and be disgusted by the results of that process.
The complaint I’d register with this explanation is that neurotic and conscientious are psychological buzzwords. There is certainly some truer way to describe vegans just as briefly.
in the age of monopolies - the whole "it's private" has less and less practical meaning. Is it a violation of 1A? No.
should we be reconsidering laws in an age where all ephemeral discussion is gone and near all discussion or communication or media is now permanent and flows through Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter?
Absolutely. The web was never meant to be so centralized and monopolized. The web has "disrupted" so many industries (ie, flat out destroyed them and then consolidated their functions under one of the main web companies), there's decreasing less alternatives for private platforms.
Censoring speech on private platforms was a really different animal 10 years ago.
edit: It is interesting to contemplate the possibility that the death of so many seniors exacerbated the inflation problem. That's a lot of assets that were previously tied up in retirement accounts and real estate that suddenly flowed into the hands of middle aged people.