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Both True: COVID is Real & The Left Manufactures Crises

LucretiusApr 23, 2021, 2:55:45 PM
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Unfortunately, there is a narrative out there that COVID, and Masks, and Social Distancing, and the Lock Downs, and the Vaccines are some sort of leftist/globalist hoax. In a way, this narrative is understandable... and yet it is still wrong. This is difficult for some on the Right to understand and to accept because there actually IS a leftist/globalist agenda to undermine our civilization with manufactured crises, and COVID and the various national and international responses DID advance that agenda. Yet despite that fact, COVID and its dangers, and the usefulness of most of the responses to it, like masks and the vaccines are still not a hoax! How can this be? To address that we have to consider both sides of the question: (1) The Reality of COVID, and (2) The Reality of the Leftist/Globalist Agenda, only then can we (3) Live in Reality.


 

1. COVID is Real and the Responses Mostly Reasonable.

First, let's separate facts from propaganda: The hard-core conspiracy theorists out there argue that if a person dies in a motorcycle accident and his corpse tests positive for COVID it is counted as a COVID death. Yes there were some very few counting irregularities mostly in the early days of the epidemic. However, this was only to be expected because, of course, clear definitions of what counts as a COVID death, and what counts as a positive test result. took time to be developed. Indeed, if no irregularities in counting had been reported, it WOULD be a sign of falsified numbers. (Honestly, do you imagine that fatality counts across 50 states, and thousands of counties, and tens of thousands of morgues and hospitals, all using initially very faulty tests, by tens of thousands of people who are all figuring it out for the first time could POSSIBLY NOT have some irregularities?)

So if we are not going to go down the rabbit hole of thinking that the numbers are all fake, what does that leave us with? There have been, as of the writing of this article, 583,933 American deaths and 3,080,275 deaths for the whole world from COVID. By context that means more Americans have died of COVID, by a sizable margin, than in any one war, and in fact the we are quickly closing in on more Americans having died from COVID than ALL American combat deaths in all wars foreign and domestic EVER (estimated to be approximately 666,441). So yes it is real, and yes it is a massive national and global emergency at least on the same scale as a World War. Any other conclusion is a conspiracy theory of epic proportions, such a theory requires believers to suppose that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people can somehow be faked. It requires that literally many tens or hundreds of thousands of medical examiners, and nurses, and emergency room staff, and doctors, all over the country and indeed the world, all be in on the conspiracy! The idea that 911 was an inside job is down-right plausible compared to the idea that COVID isn't real or isn't a global emergency of greater than world war scope!

 

OK, now that we have driven the crazies from the room. Were the lockdowns and the masks, and the social distancing, and the vaccines worth it? Some times yes, sometimes no. Masks were worth it because wearing a mask costs basically nothing, yet clearly has some effect on reduced spread. The social distancing does seem to have correlated with reduced spread as well, but not always evenly and sometimes at a high cost economically. It was probably reasonable to keep control of that at the local levels as the risk and cost was highly variable at different times and in different locations. Similarly, the vaccines mostly do seem to prevent severe disease. hospital admission, and death from the disease, and, to varying degrees, also prevent infection and spread.

 

The lockdowns are a little more complicated. They often did more harm than good, and were not used in as an effective way as they should have been. However, in some cases, they DID serve a real purpose: namely the original purpose that they were designed for: Bending the Curve. The unavoidable fact is that there are only so many ICU beds in the country, and while general hospital beds can be surged relatively quickly, ICU beds can not because the limiting factor in ICU care is not equipment but ICU-trained and intubation-trained nurses (who can not be trained quickly). If the number of cases requiring ICU care exceeds the number of beds that can be staffed to an ICU standard of care, then the case-fatality rate goes up because the standard of care goes down.. Further, there are systemic-knock-on deaths because people going to the hospital for other things, car accidents, heart-attacks, etc. also can't get the care they need because all the ICU beads are taken already. Unfortunately the lockdowns were re-tasked with stopping the spread of the disease rather than just attenuating it so it didn't hit the whole population all at once, and they were always a poor tool for that goal. This lead to a lot more economic damage than needed to happen with very little additional benefit in terms of reduced ICU over-crowding.

 

So, the narrative that COVID and the responses to it were nothing but a leftist plot IS WRONG. That said, the Left DID benefit from COVID and the responses to it. We now need to understand both how and why that is:


 

2. The Left is Addicted to Emergencies.

The Leftist agenda is all about handing control of everything in our society over to "experts". They have a deep need to feel that everything is safely under control by someone who is qualified. It is worth taking a moment to understand why the modern leftist has become so enamored of technocratic leadership and why this inevitably leads to Globalist approaches to everything.

 

Leftism in the past was about empowering the common man: trade unions, proletariat control of the means of production, universal suffrage, etc. But modern Leftism is bitter from the fact that The People, when empowered, don't choose the "correct" courses of action. This has engendered an elitist distrust of the common man amongst Leftists that bares a great deal of resemblance to a feudalistic world view. They perceive most people as, functionally, peasants who are too ignorant, or too stupid, or too provincial to know what is best for them and thus must be led for their own good.

 

Because modern Leftists is also are devotedly secular or even atheistic, they have elevated human experts into the same all-knowing-benevolent father-figure that God used to occupy in the minds of people who couldn't trust their fellow man. That is, emotionally, they hide this though in their secret hearts: "Intelligent and wise experts will tell central planners what to do and save the poor ignorant masses from their own selfish irrational consumerist ways!" Of course being very self-involved people, most of these Leftists, imagine themselves as amongst the wise enlightened experts, not amongst the ignorant masses.

 

This elevation of the expert into the savior that will redeem the ignorance and selfishness of the world is why Leftism and Globalism and Intellectualism all go hand-in-hand. The nature of expertise is that it is rare (we call it education when it is not). Being rare, there is not enough expertise to go around. Therefore, decisions guided by expertise must be centralized to allow a small number of experts to serve across the whole of society. Therefore, the more faith we put in experts, the more we need centralization of policy, and globalization is the natural end point of centralization.

 

Understood in this sense, it's easy to see why the left has been so focused on disasters for so long: In an emergency, it's easy to call for everybody to drop their own locally defined interests and pull together. The history of the Left, in anything like it's modern form, is just one very long stream of mostly engineered disasters to give them an excuse to call for everyone to pull together. Climate Change, Police Violence, White Nationalism, Sexism, The Ever Present Threat of Nuclear Annihilation, AI-Safety, Whatever... it's all just an EXCUSE to create political unity for political unity's own sake. (For more about this strategy of the use of excuses for collective action, see my earlier essay on Lifestyle Radicals). They can then try and forge that political unity into a centralist plan of action the only real purpose of which is to solidifying the centralist approach that their plan of action not-coincidentally depends upon. It doesn't matter if their plan of action will work or not, since the problem it is meant to address was manufactured to begin with.

 

With COVID they just got lucky and stumbled upon an ACTUAL emergency. The Left DID use COVID to advance its agenda, and they were well set up to do that because of course they have been manufacturing false disasters for decades now. They have taken the harnessing of panic and fear into a high art form to the point where it can be a potent force for their agenda even when the crisis is entirely imaginary. So it shouldn't be surprising that they were profoundly effective at using a real emergency with hundreds of thousands of real dead people to great effect!


 

3. Living In Reality... and Winning There!

Finally, we have come back to the unfortunate narrative that COVID was a hoax, or the responses to it were unjustified and and that all of the pandemic furor was nothing but an excuse to advance the Leftist Globalist agenda.


The COVID-Hoax narrative comes from the fact that the Right has become lazy over the decades of the Left trying to manufacture emergencies. Instead of responding with coherent rational objections tailored to each individual manufactured emergency, they have gotten into the habit of just assuming that anyone yelling the "The Sky Is Falling!" or "We Have To DO Something NOW!" is not just wrong but either imagining the crisis or out-right manufacturing it. This has lead to the Right having a reflexive and completely unthinking knee-jerk reaction to deny the credibility of any crisis in direct proportion to its reported scale. The more global, the more it is just assumed to be manufactured. To be fair, this has overwhelmingly been a correct knee-jerk reaction over the last 50 years! But when the Left got lucky and stumbled upon an actual global emergency, it meant that the knee-jerk response of "This isn't real." didn't just not work it failed spectacularly. The result is that the Left has won, not a tactical victory, but a strategic victory in that many on the Right have been permanently discredited in the public's eye.


What we need to do in the coming months and years is aggressively chip away at efforts by the Left to assert a "New Normal"... prevent their tactical and strategic gains surrounding COVID from becoming Game-Over. Fortunately, we are already well set up to do that. The political attention cycle is profoundly short, and as COVID becomes less and less of an urgent crisis, the classic: this is not a crisis anymore conservative position becomes more and more aligned with reality. But to play that card, we have to acknowledge that at one time it REALLY WAS a crisis! If we do that, we can constantly compare and contrast the situation in the present with the peak death rates from COVID in the pandemic. That contrast becomes a lever for a discarding of Masks, and Social Distancing, and even for a tightening of restrictions on how the government can call for lockdowns in the future. But you can't make that comparison if you aren't willing to acknowledge the validity of the numbers you are comparing to!

 

On a longer term, we can start to chip away at their strategic victory and even reverse it. Consider the basic truth of how the COVID crisis was ultimately brought under control... The government and the WHO did not make any vaccines... at most they just cut checks to the PRIVATE COMPANIES who are the ones who actually SOLVED the problem. All that social distancing, and mask-wearing, and collective action... those weak, and marginally effective tools were only appropriate as stop-gap-measures while the big guns of Capitalism and Technology were brought to bare. See? COVID does not need to be Game-Over for the Right.