The author is completely right in that the government at least in the US attempting to downplay, mislead or 'avoid panic' absolutely destroyed any credibility and is still suffering from it. Most people are not stupid, if provided with all available information as well as clear statements regarding the reliability of that information and just a clear message saying "hey this is new and we have no idea, we are making our best guess" people will make decent choices. Unfortunately the US decided to torpedo its credibility, and all sides decided to turn it into a political issue which a pandemic should very much not be. All politics all the time and the US is now crippling itself. In the absence of real honest leadership people turned to the loudest voices of the media. Once the people distrust the government and think they are lying its very hard to appeal to their logic again. I am very much not a fan of Bush II but he did it right after 9/11. What he did after though is a topic for another day.
Most people are not stupid, but unfortunately in the US many issues are moralized to the point that people have a hard time discussing them rationally. You question Fauci? You're an anti-science freak. You question CDC's decision? You're a Trump supporter. You ask how CDC's numbers lead to certain decisions? You're a racist. I really wish people do not attack one's motives and focus on discussing facts.
People in the US have become very good at totally ignoring the argument and just tribalizing the approach to everything. X must be right and how dare you question them as they are part of us. Nothing can be nuanced anymore. Read a twitter thread this morning discussing a father whose daughter was raped in a high school bathroom and then the perpetrator who they did not really make clear if it was someone that was trans or just a guy in a skirt was transferred to another school while pending trial and then assualted another girl. Father was obviously against trans women in the girls bathroom after that and was arrested for disturbing the peace. Crazy thing was people in the thread were more upset if someone misgendered the perpetrator than the fact that they raped 2 kids. I say this as someone that truly believes that people should be left alone to live however they want with out judgment. We live in strange times.
My interpretation is the the life in the US has been so good that Americans could never imagine what it was like living in 1950's Cuba, 1960's China, 1970's Cambodia, and North Korea. Do people really think that people in those countries were evil or were crazy? The truth is, the people there started with good intentions. They wanted to have equity. They were pained by all kinds of oppression. They genuinely believed that "anti-revolutionary" people or "anti-progressive" people can be educated. Then, it started with your neighbor reporting your indecent behavior to the authority, or your neighborhood organized to educate you. Then it went on, and elementary school students beat their school principals to death. Your neighborhood looted your family for the cause. You lost your right to go to university or get a job because your great grandpa owned properties. Ironically, no one in such nation ended up living well, except the top few. That road to hell is paved with good intension is really not a cliche.
I am sure that "the people" had good intentions. However, you can be sure that the sociopaths running the show knew perfectly well what they were doing. It's not like Mao wanted to save the people from oppression and ended up screwing everybody by mistake.
A cliche is a saying, idea, or artistic component that has lost its meaning from overuse. The way you used “the path to hell is paved with good intentions” points to the fact that it is a cliche and that you want people to be aware of that and consider it instead of reading past it.
Apart from anything else, this is pretty much what most health authorities did on most theories about COVID. Lots of people chose to listen to other high profile figures who claimed certainty instead...
> this is pretty much what most health authorities did on most theories about COVID
I guess we're living in alternate realities.
The world I'm living in, the biggest celebrity doctor in the USA has repeatedly lied about natural immunity (which is robust, durable, and superior to vaccine immunity in every study published to date), for just one example, and continues to push unnecessary vaccines on people who don't need them and indeed may be harmed by taking them, the opposite of what doctors should do.
Strange you think they're just all above board and doing their best.
Dude also has yet to tell parents to stop worrying about children. I only assume that none of these “experts” talk about who is actually at risk and who isn’t because they are trying to manipulate people into “taking this serious”. Lord help us all if the truth got out that more kids get screwed in house fires each year than they do by covid. Then we might not bother to vaccinate them or something.
I'm living in the reality where health authorities saying "we are trialling this, although until more is known we recommend not..." is generally taken as evidence that the politicians promoting the "cure" must be right, authorities saying "at present there is no evidence" or changing their recommendations is seen as evidence of their untrustworthiness and a reality where the people who have been consistently, loudly wrong have big fanbases in some cases precisely because they stick to their guns even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Haven't paid particular attention to your favourite celebrity doctor in your country so I'm not sure whether he's said anything particularly outrageous or whether you are simply denying the present scientific consensus that natural immunity to COVID appears to wane, but then again, you appear to have experienced extreme difficulty in parsing the word "most" in my post...
No. It was exactly what the prisoner's dilemma dictates an intelligent actor would do when they don't have the ability to coordinate.
If you suspect there is going to be a run on toilet paper, the obvious choice is to stockpile toilet paper before it is all gone. If you buy just enough for the next couple weeks, and you risk running out because of shortages.
The optimal solution to this IMO is to embrace raising prices during crisis, because then the market ensures that those with the most need get access to goods, and it eliminates the whole point of hoarding 3 months worth of TP naturally.
That was an interesting series of events. The initial run was not warranted in hind sight. But at the time no one knew how bad it was going to get and how long everything was going to be shut down for. After that though if you did not join in then you were potentially out of toilet paper for a couple months.
People are not stupid when their immediate interest is threatened. Now, we could argue that people as a whole have problems with estimating risk ( they do ) and predicting long term consequences ( they do ), but they can usually notice when a politician is telling them its raining, when said politician is directly pissing at them.
Then again, I am from the old country, where parents ingrain in you distrust for the government. By comparison, US population really does trust its decision-makers. Or maybe trusted, if the article is to be believed.
