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The downvotes are par for the course, if I was interested in a popularity contest I wouldn’t have commented on a thread about Fauci!

You’re right on lockdowns. The jury is out, but most seem to think them a mistake, or mistakenly applied.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0261759

According to our estimates, the policy intervention saved 866,350–1,711,150 lives (4,886,214–9,650,886 quality-adjusted life-years), while mortality attributable to the economic downturn was 57,922–245,055 lives (2,093,811–8,858,444 life-years). We conclude that the number of lives saved by the spring-summer lockdowns and other COVID-19-mitigation was greater than the number of lives potentially lost due to the economic downturn. However, the net impact on quality-adjusted life expectancy is ambiguous

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/15/9295

The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past. The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save. It is suggested therefore that a thorough cost-benefit analysis should be performed before imposing any lockdown for either COVID-19 or any future pandemic.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.625778/full

a cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health (at least 5–10 times so in terms of wellbeing years) than COVID-19 can be.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3782395

Biomedical evidence from the early months of the pandemic suggests that lockdowns were associated with a reduced viral reproductive rate, but that less restrictive measures also had a similar effect. Lockdowns are associated with reduced mortality in epidemiological modelling studies but not in studies based on empirical data from the Covid-19 pandemic. Psychological research supports the proposition that lengthy lockdowns may exacerbate stressors such as social isolation and unemployment that have been shown to be strong predictors of falling ill if exposed to a respiratory virus. Studies at the economic level of analysis points to the possibility that deaths associated with economic harms or underfunding of other health issues may outweigh the deaths that lockdowns save, and that the extremely high financial cost of lockdowns may have negative implications for overall population health in terms of diminished resources for treating other conditions.

Good point. Give me an example of critical thinking then.

Let’s use the exact topic as a springboard seeing as we’re on it.

Proposition A: A nurse complains about how horrible her experience of Covid was because of all the death and suffering… Conclusion B: So no-one should criticise Dr Fauci.

Talk me through the critical thinking that makes proposition A lead to conclusion B.

Or, with Covid itself…

Proposition: A government spokesman says I ought do X to prevent a virus from spreading. Conclusion: therefore I ought to do X

Talk me through the application of ‘critical thinking skills’ in that analysis.

I suspect we might be talking at cross purposes, as you may be using the new meaning of ‘critical thinking’, which is roughly ‘beleive everything The Atlantic tells me’.

Sure. But there are also some scientists who think the lockdown didn’t work, or only work really fast and hard. Or only work in dense populations but are useless in sparse ones. The Democrats don’t have a monopoly on truth, they’re not omniscient. They just had a different idea of how they wanted to respond based (like every other politician) on what they thought would sell well to their electorate.

Who knows what they word have actually done in power. I hate to break it to you, but politicians lie - it’s kind of their job.

I think a lot of it came from the impact of social media algorithms driving people into increasingly polarised groups such that to prove you weren’t in ‘their’ group you had to fervently believe the exact opposite of everything ‘they’ believed.

Politicians, being politicians, jumped on that and pinned their flags to one group or the other. Meanwhile, health institutions and scientists, not, as you say, magically immune from the influences the rest of us are under, did the same.

But my point is really that they all still just did their job under those circumstances. Not as saints, not as evil masterminds, but as biased, ideologically-blinded, rash, stressed-out, fucked-up, and disillusioned ordinary people. Just like the rest of us.

And some of the ideas coming out of that are going to be fine, some are going to be harmless but annoying, and a few are going to be properly crap. That’s how the world is.

What’s crazy is seeing everything as black and white.

And on your last point. Scientists did come out and question many of Fauci’s policies. They were removed from social media and in many cases fired.

It’s easy to claim majority support when you silence opposing voices.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4

Exactly. That’s his job and he did it. That’s it.

As to the obfuscation. He went on the Newt Gingrich podcast and said the idea of a lab origin was a conspiracy theory without any scientific basis eight days after a meeting he had with top scientists at which the majority were of the opinion that it probably was. In what way is that ‘not stating something as fact when it’s uncertain’?

He’d just come from a meeting where he’d been told it was uncertain, and he stated publicly that believing it amounted to conspiracy theory.

I can’t understand why people defend the man. I can’t understand why anyone would particularly hate him either. He’s just a normal political appointee.

Again, he chose a job in the public eye. He wasn’t drafted in. And he literally wrote in his diary that he was enjoying the attention.

Politicians trying to make appointees look bad is standard practice. David Kelly was literally driven to suicide by the pressure to relent over Iraq.

As above. This was a global crisis. The issues were not caused by the Republican party, nor by the Democrats, nor by anyone even in America! I know… Imagine a thing happening that isn’t directly to do with America!

A nasty virus spread throughout the world. Governments and scientists didn’t know what to do. They rushed to make policies to deal with it, within the crappy, corrupt political systems that all countries have. Most came up with a mostly crappy response, mostly dictated by corporate lobbies and electioneering, like every other policy they’ve ever come up with. Lots of people died. Lots more than would have if everything had been done perfectly, but we don’t live in such a world and we would no more have if the Democrats were in charge.

Again, this is normal. All bureaucrats were under immense pressure, it was an unprecedented situation. He faced no personal consequences whatsoever for the unpopularity of his policies and wrote in his diary how pleased he was about the positive attention he was getting. He wasn’t drafted in, he chose a highly public-facing, political appointment.

Nothing out of the ordinary. Standard political appointee willing to hold a highly public position. A mildly narcissistic pen-pusher.

But the key thing here is not Fauci’s character, it’s the fact that none of the terrible things the nurse mentioned had anything to do with him. He didn’t personally do anything to prevent them, he didn’t come up with any ideas, he didn’t ‘fight the system’ to get some concession that no one else wanted. He just followed advice, and he didn’t even do that as well as others did.

What’s any of that got to do with Dr Fauci? Covid was a global crisis managed by thousands of health policy bureaucrats across the world.

On policy, Fauci did pretty much the same as the rest of them which is follow advice from official organisations like the WHO. He didn’t save the world by coming up with some crazy idea which ‘might just work…’ like the final scenes in a Hollywood film. He’s just took the advice of the agencies whose job it was to provide it, and then relayed that advice to his staff.

Where there was uncertainty about best practice he didn’t even do particularly well, nor particularly badly either, both of which, of course can only be judged in hindsight. America’s experience policy-wise was about middling.

He certainly obfuscated more than was helpful about the likely origins, which doesn’t make him a great person, but I’m not sure that made any difference to the course of the pandemic.

Anyone whose overall assessment of Fauci is anything other than ‘meh’ needs to spend half a day with Médecins Sans Frontières and see want real heroes look like.

That’s ridiculous. It undermines the whole principle of war crimes. For there to be a war, one place has to have been invaded by another. Since invasion by aggression is already illegal, following your logic would have us throw away all remaining war crimes, if the aggressor has already broken the law and the defender can now do whatever they want.

The Geneva Convention doesn’t have a get out clause if you’re the one being invaded. Civilian targets and infrastructure are off limits, invader and defender alike, because civilians often have little control over the war they’re caught up in and don’t deserve to be killed, starved, conscripted, detained, or otherwise denied rights because of the decision of their leaders.

This should be simple stuff. The world has gone insane.

A few dozen is smaller than millions. It’s not minimising, its maths.

I’ve never heard anyone attempt to debate whether trans people exist, so the meme seems a bit weird.

The ‘debate’ seems to fall into two camps. Those who question the relationship to biological sex (sports, restrooms, prisons, etc), and those who label all such people as ‘deviant’ in some way (usually on pseudo-religious grounds or some other spurious right-wing nonsense).

It’s pointless conflating the two, they’re completely different debates for completely different reason with completely different (often vehemently opposed) groups. And it’s pointless pretending either are denying trans people’s existence.

If you’ve got a set of negative beliefs you need to fight against in society you need to actually address those beliefs, not some belief that sounds bad but nobody actually has.

It’s not a distraction from the class warfare though. It is the class warfare. The wars, plagues, and destitution are the class warfare.

The sexual exploits of that class are a minor (if appalling) sideline. It affected dozens of young women. And, again, my deepest sympathies to them, but dozens is not millions. The wholesale massacre of an entire nation is not a ‘distraction’ from a sex scandal. The sex scandal is a distraction from the wholesale massacre of a nation.

The mass exploitation of the poor is the most noteworthy feature of the ruling class. Calling them the Epstein class just makes them sound like their main crime is the exploitation of a few dozen teenagers. Their main crime is the complicity in the massacre and starvation of thousands of children, the impoverishment of millions more.

It’s insane that people seriously think this.

Millions of people have been killed, and millions of dollars have been extracted from the poor. There’s a genocide actively taking place. Anthropogenic climate change is literally an existential risk. 150 million children are at risk of starvation.

These thing pre-date Epstein, have nothing to do with Epstein, and (with the greatest sympathy to his victims), are way more important than Epstein.

I honestly would rather they burnt the files so the issue could stop taking up news feeds that should be focusing on the far, far more extensive human suffering caused by the aforementioned wars, plagues, and destitution, which, far from being g a manufactured distraction are absolutely fundamental features of Neo-liberal economies.

I agree. I was pointing out that (even if perhaps inadvertently), your post just ends up guilting people who don’t do enough activism instead. It turns, not on the problem (reducing carbon emissions), but on your comrades (those who share your concern, but disagree about how best to achieve it).

The responses blaming individuals don’t seem to be exculpating corporations. They’re just adding a dimension they felt was missing.

Solidarity is about accepting into the fold anyone who agrees with a broad aim and working toward that end.

So anyone concerned about our impact on the planet can work together to minimise it. Some by campaigning to reduce consumption, some by campaigning against corporate overreach, some by campaigning for political parties who have better agendas. And each campaign supports and nurtures the other.

What we get instead are endless (and often furious) arguments between each campaign about how they’ve got it wrong and their approach will never work.

I suppose in the vein of “the one thing I don’t tolerate is intolerance”, I’d say the one thing I will always say isn’t going to work is telling every other well-meaning activist that their campaign isn’t going to work.

(The obvious caveat here is determining ‘well-meaning’, but hey, no system is perfect)

Yep. Solidarity, collectivism.

Which presumably is why the left wing spends 100% of it’s time and energy on purity tests, cancelling, essentailist identity politics, and knee-jerk tribalism…

… classic solidarity-building. We should have this problem sorted in no time.

I don’t understand this argument. On the one had you have sympathy for the average car user who hasn’t the time or resources to struggle with poor transport infrastructure and don’t necessarily have the resources to make preventative purchasing decisions, but then, on the other had you say

Needing to put in the political struggle to take on the corporate interests… takes effort that deviates from your normal life

You don’t seem to have avoided the responsibility being laid at the individual at all. You’ve kept it firmly in the same place. All you’ve done is allowed those individuals to keep their materialistic lifestyle because “It’s OK, I’m an ‘activist’”.

Activism, for most people, is not sacrifice. Its a jolly good day out with a cool social group, sometimes there’s even free music, circus acts, the works. You get to waive a flag, and everyone congratulates you on what an amazing person you are.

What’s properly amazing is taking a slightly less well-paying job because it’s on a bus route, or not going out twice a week so you can afford organic cotton instead of polyester, or avoiding that deal trip to Tibet to meditate with monks to save fuel. Zero social credit, zero visibility.

And if these big companies have the economic system so stitched up that individual choices barely matter, then what on earth makes you think they won’t have the political system similarly stitched up so that individual activism doesn’t make a difference either?