I think liberal prudishness has to do with the algorithmic capture of the mind more than I’d given credit for previously.

I need to think about this more. But there’s definitely a there there.

Has anyone written how the modern focus on emotional health has been perverted into a valorization of defense mechanisms, distrust, and avoidant attachment style?

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 28, 2021

I write about that topic on this blog from time to time. But as for books, there is Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman.

There might be others, but that’s the only one I am aware of. I wish someone would write something long-form in this vein that also encompassed the pandemic and prudishness, though.

pretty frustrating that we have a technology that allows real-time programming of vaccines to match arbitrary virus variants, and we are just choosing not to use it

— \u221e (@hdevalence) August 27, 2021

It is. Our “experts” and institutions are useless. We could easily be releasing tailored vaccines every month. Anyone who says that is impossible is (of course probably a liberal) fucking lying to you.

We could and should be doing this. But we won’t, because all is broken.

CPC delivering on my entire political platform today: "Stop worshipping celebrities and get to work building kilometer-scale, ultra-large spaceships." https://t.co/rVKUlxIs3s

— scientism (@mr_scientism) August 27, 2021

This is the sort of thing we should be doing, as much as it makes the milquetoast libs cry. Hell, it’s not a reason to do it but it’s certainly an added benefit.

Charles Koch funded eviction push while investing in real estate companies.

That’s just what I expected to see. In other news, 1 in 7 homes are now purchased by hedge funds and/or Wall Street. This is already bad and will not end well at all. Home prices are influenced on the margins, so even 1 in 7 means much, much higher prices for all — which is the point here.

Makes homes unaffordable by mass purchases, rent them out at obscene prices, hoover up money and productive capacity. Perfect evil for evil times.

It really is comical that Cuomo was being showered with plaudits and prizes when he was known to have enabled the deaths of thousands, and had it all taken away for being a big of lech.https://t.co/1lEwgtDxi2

— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) August 26, 2021

In America, you can kill thousands. I mean, just kill them. No consequences. But grab someone’s ass and you’re done, sucker!

Priorities….

The first half of this essay is fantastic and I say that not just because I agree with much of it. It discusses the peculiar attachment that many people — mostly on the left — have to Covid restrictions and practices around them.

Some people seem to want or even need something much more existential – spiritual? libidinal? – than the pure scientific accuracy to which they pledge their allegiance. This excess is evident in their aggression toward the very genre of the editorial itself, and their insistence that our moment of emergency can reasonably brook no opinion but the most pessimistic.

These responses expose part of our collective cultural unconscious that has identified not, perhaps, with the virus itself, but certainly with the conditions of lockdown: with emergency culture, maybe even apocalypse culture, with conditions of prolonged terror and the kind of defensive retreat that terror inspires.

The second half misses the mark a bit, I think, but the whole essay is solidly written and expresses better than I have what I’ve been bloviating about on the blog here for a while: the fact that there really is a large contingent of ascetic lockdown lifer types who crave weird restrictions and abridgements of behavior, regardless of risk or any sense it makes. They are akin to Christian 15th Century flagellants and just as tiresome.

I am glad the author also recognized Zero Covid as the absurd “everyone gets a pony” fantasy that in fact is and always was.

When I’ve discussed this liberal scolding asceticism with a few people, they’ve denied this is even occurring so it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who has noticed its prominence.

Back, though, to what I see as wrong about the essay, or tangential to the real causes. The author mentions HIV/AIDS, barebacking, and the “loss of loss.” I don’t think that’s what’s really happening here. Covid unfortunately arrived at the perfect time, a time when liberal prudishness was reaching new heights. The pandemic also coincided with also-present and related degrowther tendencies. Thus, Covid restrictions become enmeshed with ideas about how to prevent climate change and the extant and intensifying prissy prudish ideas around relationships and sex. This agglomerated into a big ball of shame and scolding and recriminations over how very naughty (but not me! Certainly not me!) everyone was being to want to return to some form of a normal life after being vaccinated.

That is a better explanation than the psychosocial fallout of the HIV/AIDS crisis having enough relevant similarities.

This is exactly right. I had hoped that the increasing cultural emphasis on mental health would make people less likely to fall into this toxic worldview. But I keep seeing it more and more. https://t.co/ePb6opfS9e

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 26, 2021

I’ve written before about how prudes are absolutely obsessed with sex, so this makes perfect sense in that context. You simply cannot be a prude and not be sex-obsessed.

That said, a major contributing factor is that the liberal left’s examination of how social relations work bears very little correspondence to reality because the libs are compelled by and fascinated with “protection from harm.” Unfortunately, they define harm as “anything mildly uncomfortable and/or difficult.” Most of them see conflict as abuse and are very, very concerned with enforcing what they see as proper assortative mating and mandating neoliberal prerogatives and priorities as “morality.” Protection from harm is just a cloak over all that.

Part of it is me just being a contrarian and fuddy-duddy, but the idea that everyone should choose and have their own fucking pronouns is just completely asinine to me. It’s absurd, and I think those who champion this practice actually know it’s absurd. I believe that’s part of the point of it, like when I asked one of my teachers in high school to call me a ridiculous nickname.

This is the triumph of neoliberalism in the individual mind itself.

Here is another article of many I’ve seen that that uses “efficacy” and/or “effectiveness” to mean “sterilizing immunity.”

The actual researchers cited don’t quite make that mistake, but they also don’t seem all that clear on the difference, either.

Efficacy/Effectiveness: the treatment has some (positive) effect on the course of the disease. For instance, does it prevent hospitalization? Reduce symptoms? Reduce death rates? Reduce sequelae? Reduce viral load? Reduce the duration of sickness? Etc.

Sterilizing Immunity: Does the treatment prevent infection altogether?

These are NOT the same thing. Therefore, nearly all of these panicked articles (and lib tweets) stating that the vaccines are no longer effective are completely wrong because that’s not actually what any of the data indicates.