by 4bpp | 2025-09-21 17:35:49+00:00
There's little point in retreading all the old arguments about COVID here (whose mind is going to be changed at this point?), but just to illustrate the sort of things I am talking about, there was the early whiplash in government messaging about mask-wearing[1], where the relevant officials outright stated after the fact that they were issuing instructions that were at least deliberately vague about the motivations in order to further an interest (prioritising supply for medical professionals) that was not communicated to the public; and the argumentative contortions[2] to exempt certain classes of political protest from the restrictions that were imposed on everything else.

I'm sure that if you were tapped into certain strands of "the conversation" on Twitter at the time, you did not feel like any of these decisions were made behind your back for inscrutable reasons! I'm also sure that all the way from 1918 through to 1945, there were certain strata of society that were looped into the decision making and never once got the feeling that they were being governed "by surprise". In neither of those situations was this the case for the majority of the affected population, though, and appealing to your own rarefied status as a "scientist" hardly helps the argument that your own experience is any evidence that government during COVID happened by consent.

> Was COVID something new? Yes. It killed a million people in the US because it was new. Is that similar to Nazi Germany's fear of the threat of Jews? To Nazi Germany's sudden decision to invade Poland? Why is COVID your touchpoint of something similar to that, and not something like 9/11, which killed far fewer people, but was enough to send the country to war, with lots of deliberations in secret and secret evidence that proved to be faked?

Editing to replace a section here, because I was unhappy with the (lack of) clarity in my original text. I am not just meaning to make a two-way comparison between COVID and one or another of the German periods. We are looking at four distinct situations here:

(1) The Weimar interbellum (1918~1936). Well-meaning people were beset by a creeping unease over instability and communism (which by 1933 had already killed on the order of ten times your COVID figure). They chose to act on it by enabling Hitler's rise to power.

(2) The Nazi era (1936~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of communism, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease, but they did not act upon it. Bad outcomes.

(3) The COVID period (2019~2023?). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Their claim to legitimacy is ultimately rooted in the threat of COVID, which is very dangerous, but the connection to many measures they take is tenuous (though "understood" by some set of people "in the know"). Well-meaning people were beset by creeping unease. They chose to act on it by enabling Trump's rise to power.

(4) Trump II (2025~). One group of people in power pushes through unprecedented oppressive policies. Well-meaning people are beset by creeping unease. (What's next?)

Looking at the first three cases where outcomes are known, do you actually see some pattern that looks like it'd yield a good rule for when unease should be acted upon by well-meaning people? Given these examples and your alignment of course you would be tempted to say "when they are left-wing", but it's not like we can't find relatively left-coded examples similar to (1), or right-coded examples similar to (2). I would go looking to spin a narrative around the French Revolution, or the two phases of the Russian Revolution (which might well be parseable as a case of left action against the Empire, followed by a case of right inaction against the Bolsheviks), but this would require some more research to do at a reasonable level of quality.

> But I suspect that there are many people like you, and it scares the hell out of me.

Well, if it makes you feel any better, I am not American or in the US anymore (though I spent many years there as a PhD student, including through the COVID years).

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea...