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Well, props for honesty. You don't give a fig about your safety or anyone else's, you're just going to declare this over and pretend it doesn't exist and whatever happens to you or to me or to anyone, happens.
I don't agree at all with your comment. I largely share Ohio_Peasant's views. Two years of lockdowns followed by varying theatrical restrictions have obviously not worked. One peak at the news headlines, or for that matter CD posts demonstrates this.
If lockdowns accomplish one thing surely, it is to destroy civil society and culture. Many of these changes created by the Covid-19 pandemic are erasing our identity as human beings. We cannot send our children to school. We cannot send our preschool children to socializing nursery school. We cannot enjoy the benefits of the arts, including music and museums. The question is, what distinguishes us from primates from which we emerged?
This is not far-fetched. When our state governors have thoughtlessly closed down businesses with no plan of reopening, they erase much of what distinguishes a human being from the animals. From the point of view of appearance, how long can we all go without a haircut? We are all going to be very messy look in short order, except of course those that surreptitiously have a “home visit” from a barber or hairstylist.
Much of what has made human society distinct from the animal kingdom comes from the socializing and collective experience of enjoying music and visual art. We don’t know why painting started, but it started on the walls of the caves. Doubtless cave people got together to admire those paintings. More recently, artists have created great works of art, by Michelangelo, Picasso, and others.
Live performance music is another collectively civilizing experience. From festivals such as Woodstock to the folk coffeehouses, in other venues, music is designed to be enjoyed in groups. The presence of applause or lack of applause shape what musicians do.
Religion is another such shaper of socialization. I cannot imagine the cheerlessness of a world without weddings, Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, confirmations, Christmas Mass, the Hajj in Mecca, and other such events. In short, humans are gregarious species. We need people.
When our state governors have thoughtlessly closed down businesses with no plan of reopening, they erase much of what distinguishes a human being from the animals. From the point of view of appearance, how long can we all go without a haircut? We are all going to be very messy look in short order, except of course those that surreptitiously have a “home visit” from a barber or hairstylist.
My wife has been giving my stepson and I haircuts. She figured it out, and she's gotten quite good at it. She bought a professional kit and studied up and we allowed her to practice. The first time was just okay, the second pretty good, and the third, as good as any we've gotten professionally. She also is the first person to cut my hair as short as I'd like, because the pros are always trying to get me back every 4 weeks.
What distinguishes us from animals is not the ability to hire someone to cut our hair, it is our ability to adapt to circumstances as required.
First thing I did at the start of the pandemic was get a separate 20 amp circuit installed in the basement and purchased a chest freezer to minimize our trips to the store, for example.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
Much of what has made human society distinct from the animal kingdom comes from the socializing and collective experience of enjoying music and visual art. We don’t know why painting started, but it started on the walls of the caves. Doubtless cave people got together to admire those paintings. More recently, artists have created great works of art, by Michelangelo, Picasso, and others.
Live performance music is another collectively civilizing experience. From festivals such as Woodstock to the folk coffeehouses, in other venues, music is designed to be enjoyed in groups. The presence of applause or lack of applause shape what musicians do.
Religion is another such shaper of socialization. I cannot imagine the cheerlessness of a world without weddings, Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, confirmations, Christmas Mass, the Hajj in Mecca, and other such events. In short, humans are gregarious species. We need people.
I don't disagree with any of this but a Bar Mitzvah were most everyone gets sick and grandpa dies choking on his own spit is pretty cheerless, too, in the end.
You can't be promoting this sort of elevated dreck unless you think the rules don't apply to you, or that the situation we find ourselves in is "fake news". At least I don't see how.
I get that this is especially hard on extroverts and front line workers, which I am neither. But come on. You are literally declaring a pandemic over by fiat so that you can go listen to a jazz quartet? That's very civilized, and also, the very height of entitlement.
“I can do me” only to limited extent. We live in a society, and an increasingly regimented one. Am I so obstreperous, or so heroic, to flaunt the rules? I am willing to be ostracized, ejected from various establishments, fired? I still wish to partake of society, however much I regret and lament its choices. By “doing me” to much, I invite swift and severe punishment.
Thus the frustration. How we live, depends starkly on our collective will. I can no more change this, than I could get atheists to find Jesus, or Muslims to eat pork. Indeed, the pork-analogy is apt. I love pork! But what if I were living in a Muslim country? How could I "do me", eating pork to my heart's content, if pork were unavailable and illegal?
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
What distinguishes us from animals is not the ability to hire someone to cut our hair, it is our ability to adapt to circumstances as required.
No, what distinguishes us from animals, is that I don't have to hunt. I can pay others to do that. I don't have to rear young. I can pay others to do that. I don't have to defend our clade or pack. I can pay others to do that. In short, what sets humans apart from all other animals, is not that we can conceptualize the future, whereas they live in the mere present; or that we use tools, whereas they don't... it's that humans can outsource the labors and troubles of life, in exchange for lucre.
What we have now, for example via your own narrative, is a reversion to a more primitive state, where we're all frontiersmen, rugged self-sustaining individuals. But pray tell: if that is so, they does it not also follow, that my obligations to civilization weaken?
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
...But come on. You are literally declaring a pandemic over by fiat so that you can go listen to a jazz quartet? That's very civilized, and also, the very height of entitlement.
Perhaps, but are these things not also symmetric? If a person so grievously fears the virus, that he insists that all others be distanced and masked, then is this not also entitlement? I am not raising children, or caring for the elderly. Others do, and that's their prerogative. I applaud them! But to what extent must I curtail my own choices, and modify my own behavior, to better advance the tasks and needs of these others?
Again I say: what is so grievously frustrating, isn't the pandemic, but our response to the pandemic.
I have posted various times on the unraveling of civil society, and was asked if I was scared of lockdowns and if so, why. The answer is I fear for the disruption to society and I do not think we can tolerate much more. There was recently an excellent article on Apple News which unfortunately is paywalled on this very issue, though my post does not quote from or borrow from the article. The gist of the article is that we are two years into lockdowns and restrictions and are still subject to a constant drumbeat of more restrictions, and more, and more.
The way lockdowns started in March 2020 was necessarily chaotic, since it was a response to an emergency. In hindsight it may have been too thorough and precipitous. Overnight, institutions of civil society such as operas, symphonies, religious gatherings and schools were closed. In the case of the latter, the years of education and social learning, between ages 2 and in the case of graduate school cannot really be made up, especially 2 to 18. The educational losses alone have been grievous. Even now, children have to learn about human interactions largely without seeing people's faces.
As far as operas and symphonies, they are part of what makes Western culture great. Time will tell how many opera, symphony and chamber orchestra ensembles will revive and how many are gone for good.
As for religious institutions, the loss of proper funerals, and more joyous life-cycle events such as confirmations and weddings cannot really be made up by "celebrations" later on. Religious life disappeared at a time when it was needed most. Networks of friends and/or moderately close acquaintances that gathered, for example, at Torah Study (and their non-Jewish equivalents), gone.
More prosaically, even close friendships are basically shredded, despite protestations to the contrary. I spoke with a very close friend of 49 years and said this back in December. His response was "h*ll no" (I hope I didn't violate a TOS), and said "we'd all get together after me and my wife have boosters." Maybe we will, maybe we won't, but it will inevitably feel forced and not really be enjoyable. We last gathered the Saturday before Thanksgiving 2019.
In short, there is a lot to be scared of, and it isn't solely personal loneliness. While I have picked up my reading a fair amount, see my contributions on What book are you reading? hobbies are not a replacement for friendships. Fortunately, my older son, now 25, has his first serious girlfriend. My younger son's opportunities have shrunken as activities in which his other disabled friends participated are now perceived as being too dangerous.
I fear that society has created a dystopia by embracing "excess" or "abundance" of caution.
We’ll reopen. Government needs our tax monies, needs full employment, needs to export and import. What we don’t need are excess hospitalizations and deaths.
We’ll reopen. Government needs our tax monies, needs full employment, needs to export and import. What we don’t need are excess hospitalizations and deaths.
Most of that post was written in April 2020. Here we are with the drums still beating for lockdown.
[quote=mordant;62590722]It is not caution that is causing the difficulty here, it is Covid, which requires certain cautions.
The irony is that a more thorough lockdown in the beginning coupled with adequate financial supports for people who could not work, would have had much better outcomes. But we decided instead to have weak lockdowns and to reopen too soon, and are presently yo-yo-ing through increasingly severe waves that keep cropping up when we do the job half-baked.
Countries as diverse as China and New Zealand have had much better outcomes with clear and decisive policies.
I'm admittedly influenced by the luxury of having had an almost entirely remote profession for some twenty years now (software development) and by being an introvert, so this has not been as burdensome for me as for many. However, what we have definitely seen is that we have lots of room to adapt how we work, socialize and play. For example, studies show that most eight hour stints at the office result in about 3 hours of productive work, the rest being micromanagement, meetings, and waiting for other people. No wonder people actually prefer working from home!
I share many of your concerns but there's that wee little detail of 5.4 million dead people with more on the way, and that is also a concern. Arguments that we can't take any more are basically calling those kinds of losses to be acceptable.
And that doesn't account for the fact that, depending on whose figures you believe, 10 to 30 percent of people who are infected with Covid end up with "long covid", chronic symptoms which appear a few weeks after recovery (or, frighteningly, asymptomatic infection) and linger for weeks, months, and now years in some with no end in sight. The severity of the symptoms range from "relatively" minor, like losing some or all of your sense of smell or taste, to totally debilitating and bed-ridden. I am pretty sure we have a major post-viral syndrome on our hands from that, and how much of THAT can society stand? What about the bill for lost productivity as people increasingly are reinfected? What about the right of people to feel reasonably safe to do necessary things like shop for food without worrying about some un-vaxed maskhole breathing all over them? How much of that can society bear?
I used to play cards on Saturday mornings with a group of men. That stopped when the senior citizen center closed. I re-started for a few weeks when they reopened, but then the Delta surge came up on us and I stopped. I was the only one who did, the others said, shoot, we're old anyway, we're going to keep going. I'm the youngest of them at 64 and I need to keep working for a few more years to provide for my family. If I were 75 it might be a somewhat different calculus, but even there, do I really want to risk dying choking on my own spit by hanging out with precisely the most vulnerable demographic, vaxed or not?
You say that we are killing society with excessive caution ... what would society look like if we throw caution to the winds?
I still remember them stacking bodies in refrigerated trailers outside hospitals in NYC and digging mass graves on Staten Island.
No thanks. We'll just have to find a way and do the best that we can.[/QUOTE)
Thank you for your wisdom, very well said I could not agree with you more, I always say what part of we are in a deadly or @ the least a life changing PANDEMIC the 1st in my lifetime do you non vaxxed not understand??
most if not ALL of us were Vaxxed without our permission but our parents permissions when we were babies and if not vaxxed we were not allowed to enter ANY SCHOOL, we do not know what was in those Mealses, Rubella, mumps, etc Vaccines back then but never heard anyone complain about those shots
Last edited by jojo1980; 12-31-2021 at 09:21 PM..
Reason: left out important point
“I can do me” only to limited extent. We live in a society, and an increasingly regimented one. Am I so obstreperous, or so heroic, to flaunt the rules? I am willing to be ostracized, ejected from various establishments, fired? I still wish to partake of society, however much I regret and lament its choices. By “doing me” to much, I invite swift and severe punishment.
Thus the frustration. How we live, depends starkly on our collective will. I can no more change this, than I could get atheists to find Jesus, or Muslims to eat pork. Indeed, the pork-analogy is apt. I love pork! But what if I were living in a Muslim country? How could I "do me", eating pork to my heart's content, if pork were unavailable and illegal?
Society and its interrelationships and interdependencies is a constant struggle to balance the needs and rights of any one individual against the needs and of other individuals, singly and collectively. I have never been free to drive at twice the speed limit or to blast loud music out of my house at midnight. Fortunately for me, I've never felt either need. But some people do, and find it quite vexing when the authorities spoil their fun.
When it comes to the pandemic, it's a little like why my wife and I own two cars. It's very seldom that one of us goes somewhere, and during the period the person is gone, the other absolutely, positively needs to go somewhere else and it simply cannot wait. I would love to save a few hundred a year on car insurance and licensing and so forth, not to manage the opportunity cost and depreciation of the money tied up in the second car. But my wife just likes the IDEA that she is not "trapped" in the house without a car.
Similarly, I think a lot of what is oppressive to us about the pandemic consists of ideas more than reality, just like our need for two cars (which, ironically, is even less of a need now than ever). We are attached to the familiar, and to having things our own way. Sure, I miss going out to dinner or over to a friend's house or to a concert on a lark. But I won't die if I forego those things, either. Sure, some office supervisors probably miss strutting from cubicle to cubicle ruining everyone's work focus, because it made them feel like they were actually way more important than they actually were to the process. They probably went through a period of extreme anxiety assuming their employees weren't adults and would spend all their time playing video games if they weren't physically present in the middle of the supervisor's personal panopticon so he could crack the whip. But guess what, the sky didn't fall, and there were actually many benefits to remote work in many industries, as well as to being way more flexible around employee preference in that regard.
So my point is that a lot of this is habituation and rigid thinking. We are social but also intelligent and we can adapt if we allow it. Just like we adapted to a completely different and less easy-going and carefree experience of air travel after 9/11, we can adapt to this. What you are asking for is like asking to disband the TSA and allow people to carry pinking shears on flights again. 9/11 and subsequent events changed all that permanently, and Covid is doing the same. Do you seriously think this is the last variant we'll see? Or the last pandemic, for that matter? The proximity of people to animals and the ubiquity of global travel, plus climate change, practically guarantees this is but a dry rehearsal for more to come.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
What we have now, for example via your own narrative, is a reversion to a more primitive state, where we're all frontiersmen, rugged self-sustaining individuals. But pray tell: if that is so, they does it not also follow, that my obligations to civilization weaken?
I am not advocating for being a prepper. In theory I could fill my cellar with survival food, buy guns and gold, and set up a diesel generator, but if things deteriorate to that point, it's a far bigger problem than me and we're all screwed and might as well let the end come rather than prolong it. People who fancy themselves survivalists don't know the first thing about the reality of it. It's a fun game for a couple of days, and then it's just a pain in the touche.
No, I'm just talking about being considerate of others, particularly the vulnerable, the old, the very young, and since you can protect them largely by protecting yourself ... it seems like not that big of a deal to me. Or dare I say, a no-brainer.
We went to a lovely orchestral concert in October where everyone was spread out in the auditorium and masked. I returned to my men's group at the senior center for a few weeks in the late spring, before the Delta surge. We still eat restaurant food, we are just doing it at home or occasionally, in outdoor restaurant seating. We pay other people to do our shopping for us (to borrow from your thinking of outsourcing everything). Division of labor is a great thing. And as to culture, yes I'd prefer more of it in person but I just finished listening to a lovely pops concert on the computer and it delighted me more or less as much as it would have in person. As to movies ... never did like grody movie theaters with people coming and going and chattering at each other. Haven't missed it, modern wide screen TVs are just as good, or close enough.
I preferred the pre-pandemic (apparent) reality, just as I preferred things before 9/11 compared to after. But I don't feel deprived, either. Granted, I'm a knowledge worker and an introvert ... in some ways when the pandemic came, I said, "hold my beer, I got this." It is harder on the extrovert, the artist, and certainly on the front line worker. But we still live a life of luxury relative to even 50 years ago. We won't die. We won't wither. Or needn't anyway. What a bunch of entitled whiners we have become!
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
Perhaps, but are these things not also symmetric? If a person so grievously fears the virus, that he insists that all others be distanced and masked, then is this not also entitlement? I am not raising children, or caring for the elderly. Others do, and that's their prerogative. I applaud them! But to what extent must I curtail my own choices, and modify my own behavior, to better advance the tasks and needs of these others?
To whatever extent common courtesy and common sense require [shrug].
I don't, for example, mind maskholes that much on the walking path that goes past my back yard, but I mind their foolish, selfish performative BS very much at the druggist or the grocer. I was relieved when mask mandates took effect. Masks aren't a big deal. You can get used to them, apart from the occasional person with severe breathing disorders. Sweet Jesus on toast, I can't believe I even have to explain that. I'm not asking anything of other's I'm unwilling to do myself.
Now I don't think it's probably masks or vaccines that you're personally chafing at so much as freedom and ease of movement, but this is how I look at all such things. I'm willing to take precautions for my sake and for the common good, just as I'm willing to obey the speed limit or not throw wild parties in the middle of the night or to pay my taxes or wait patiently in line for the cashier without making a fuss. It's just the price of living in a civil society. What makes it uncivil is not having to use digital substitutes for some in-person activities or performances, it's ... people being uncivil, callous, or indifferent to others in the service of their own preferences.
I am not in favor of lockdowns and don't think they will come back. More to the point, I'm very much in agreement with mordant, except the pessimism that this might last for many years. It's hard psychologically for me to accept. I think his point about extraverts being most harmed by this is the most relevant to the psychology of the topic. I, an introvert, feel as though many or most of them melted down from lockdown and now panic at and reject any suggestions to socialize more safely or formal closures of some social options. I see a way out of this that includes changed social habits, but people used to partying or other large group activities seem unable to for example pick small group hiking as a substitute hobby. I more understand religious extraverts who don't want to give up godly gatherings, but even that doesn't work in a pandemic indoors at least.
Society and its interrelationships and interdependencies is a constant struggle to balance the needs and rights of any one individual against the needs and of other individuals, singly and collectively. I have never been free to drive at twice the speed limit or to blast loud music out of my house at midnight. Fortunately for me, I've never felt either need. But some people do, and find it quite vexing when the authorities spoil their fun.
I obey the speed limits because I fear fines, arrest, or other forms of punishment. I do not agitate against speed limits because the prospect of success is nil, while the prospect of embarrassment and wasted effort, is high. Many aspects of society work this way. I acknowledge them, but do so without enthusiasm or happy acquiescence. As to the loud parties, well, my current neighborhood is replete with them. What can I do? Yes, I’ve called the police, and they duly promised to “look into it”. The parties still persist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
... Sure, I miss going out to dinner or over to a friend's house or to a concert on a lark. But I won't die if I forego those things, either.
Of course you'd not die. But let us ask ourselves: beyond what point is it still worth living?
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
What you are asking for is like asking to disband the TSA and allow people to carry pinking shears on flights again.
Well, yes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
No, I'm just talking about being considerate of others, particularly the vulnerable, the old, the very young, and since you can protect them largely by protecting yourself ... it seems like not that big of a deal to me. Or dare I say, a no-brainer.
What is or isn't a big deal, is subjective. I don't think that it's a big deal if my mortgage company mandated that I came into their office annually, did 100 push-ups without pause or rest in front of the office manager, or otherwise my loan would immediately be called. But that's just me... because personally it's not a big deal. For some others, one gathers, that might indeed be a big deal. ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
I don't, for example, mind maskholes that much on the walking path that goes past my back yard, but I mind their foolish, selfish performative BS very much at the druggist or the grocer. I was relieved when mask mandates took effect. Masks aren't a big deal. You can get used to them, apart from the occasional person with severe breathing disorders.
Masks do indeed annoy me, to very considerable degree. But once again, there’s nothing to be done. I’d love to live in an “island of the damned”, where the raw and recalcitrant law of the jungle applies, every man for his proverbial self, and disputes are settled by methods primitive and direct. But that exists only in literature or film.
Meanwhile, with remarkable degree of symmetry, it is the mask-adherents whom I behold as behaving with “foolish, selfish performative BS”. Because as with post 9-11 security, it is indeed theater and a two-bit sanctimonious righteousness. This view is admittedly in the minority. One only hopes, however fondly, that in the fullness of time, more and more of the wavering and uncertain, will come around to this view, and that we will accept death – however much, however soon, however harsh – as the inevitability of having been born. Indeed, this is my personal mechanism for accepting the various restrictions levied upon us. We were born into restrictions, raised in restrictions, and live in restrictions. It's the reality of this mess that we've been building, as humanity, for 12,000 years. You know, "adapting".
Thus outlets such as the present one, where at very least we can – at least for now – publically note our emotional distress with society as it is, and the germ of our wishes, for how we’d wish society to hypothetically be.
Not all the research points to the mental heatlh of extroverts being more damaged by the pandemic - traumatized, I'd call it - but I tend to believe it. Although it's more a subtype of extrovert, apparently. https://www.theguardian.com/society/...covid-lockdown
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Spot on and well said
