Covid is a litmus test for stupidity

 The esteemed Jane Jacobs, who had a pretty good handle on what was wrong with people, wrote about what failing cultures had in common. A biggie was that people quit thinking in terms of "logos," that being knowledge and reason, and started thinking in terms of "mythos," which were basically half-baked ideas based on what people thought they remembered about the past. Another good observation she had was how "elites" backed into a corner double down on what got them backed into the corner in the first place.

All of it is a sign of people running out of ideas. Can't make the crops grow, everyone is starving? Just sacrifice some people to the moon god or hang some witches! That'll fix everything. The unwashed rabble getting restless and angry because the nobles are screwing them good and hard? Don't reform anything, go oppress that unwashed rabble and throw bigger parties! That'll fix everything. Running out of ideas is the same as running out of the ability to adapt and change. It'd be like dropping a T-Rex into Antarctica and expected Good Things to happen. The dinosaurs are dead, and so are all the cultures that ran out of good ideas and the ability to think up new ones.

Which brings us to covid, which has done a great job of showing us rigid and thinking and bimodal stupidity in action. One one hand, you have the "establishment" which says "sit down and shut up, peasants!" On the other hand, you have the peasants who say "you're trying to murder/sterilize us/turn us into zombies with masks and vaccines!"

All this is mostly because of mythos and elite retrenchment. Education has gone so far down the crapper that no one really remembers what life was like before vaccines. The people who spent their lives in iron lungs due to polio would have definitely appreciated being vaccinated instead. So, instead of at least being open to the idea of vaccines, people are coming up with dumber and dumber myths around them. You can't get attention by saying "Well, maybe we need to keep an eye on how effective these are and make sure they're safe," so it instead becomes "The gummint got the vaccines from aliens and they don't do nothing but turn us into food for aliens!" Stuff like that is always accompanied by whispered tones and wide eyes as if the person saying it fears being watched (of course, they then rush to post it everywhere they can so they can get attention).

The elites, on the other hand, run around saying "You must comply!", "Trust the science (always)!", and "We know better than you!" They don't help their case by ignoring their own rules around masking, social distancing, and going to large parties. Oops. And, trusting the science and always complying leads to folks like Mengele jabbing twins with bleach.

Politicizing the whole thing didn't help, either. Since the pandemic started when Trump was in office, it was a handy political club by the left to use against him. If it had started when Biden was in office, it would have been a handy club for the right to use against him. Automatically, anyone on the other side of the spectrum, even if they invented a cure for cancer and fusion energy, is still the devil themselves. Vaccines were well under way during last year's presidential campaign. Stable genius Kamala Harris said she wouldn't get any vaccine developed under the Trump presidency (maybe this is why BIPOC communities have lower vaccination rates? Just thinking out loud...) Now that Biden is in office, any scientific guidelines or reporting is automatically suspect until proven otherwise. Even if Ron DeSantis doesn't regret flipping off the medical establishment in the name of politics, all the Floridians who are sick and/or likely to see tourism fall off a cliff, might be having second thoughts.

Personally, I'm taking a - horror of horrors - a reasoned and moderate view. Do vaccines help? Even if they don't keep you from getting it, they make it far less worse. Funny, but all the people I know who had serious cases of it are also all vaccinated now. Do masks work? Probably, sorta, even if they're not a panacea. If nothing more, it keeps people from sneezing on you. Is it possible that people who have already been infected have a much lower chance of getting it again? Seems like it, too. Just being able to step back and think about shit for a little bit makes all the difference, doesn't it?