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Homo Ignoramicus

Published by marco on

I watched a video called “Do Lockdowns Work?” in late December and wrote down a bunch of notes and thoughts as I did so. The title is ostensibly interesting, but they didn’t really talk about that topic all that much in the 80 minutes of the video.

First off, I don’t want my picking on Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal to be read as support of the policies or ideas of whomever they happen to oppose. I listened to their rather long, 80-minute video because I’ve learned from them in the past and think that they generally have useful and well-sourced things to say. Not always, but often enough. That said, I haven’t listened to Dore in a while, maybe half a year.

Still, that I’m not criticizing whomever would be considered to be in opposition to them is much more an indication of the even more clearly poor quality of those arguments, which I don’t even bother examining or reporting on anymore in anything more than a cursory manner.

So, here’s the video:

How Lockdowns Devastate You While Boosting Billionaires by Jimmy Dore (YouTube)

Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal are suffering from the plague of having been right a few times, so they’re always right (or least that they’re right in this instance). Half of what they say is OK, but they’re acting like there was another way out of COVID (at least at the beginning).

The lockdown prevented people from getting cancer checkups. OK, fair. But they would have been prevented from those checkups anyway because of the hospitals filling up. They don’t have any nuance. They don’t address the fact that the lockdowns did have a medical justification. They just dismiss it out of hand, as if the pandemic wasn’t really a pandemic, even though it’s effects were massively ameliorated by the policies that they’re chastising.



Still, people like Max and Jimmy will win in the end. They’ll get their way: the world is letting it rip, so let’s see. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe they will have been right.

Lockdowns are unhealthy

They talk about how lockdowns are unhealthy as if they’d discovered this fact. This is not news. This is not something that no-one knows. They paraphrase the most hyperbolic formulations and predictions and then pretend that that’s the norm. No-one sane is saying that there are no costs

They also reiterate the Great Barrington Declaration, which no-one else I listen to still supports. Most never did. The idea there was to protect the elderly but let the rest of society go (because COVID poses no danger to anyone under 65). That was the idea. This turns out to (A) not be true, at scale and (B) advocates a lockdown for the most mentally vulnerable. They don’t care what “isolating the elderly” actually implies, though. Nor do they care whether the alternative to the lockdowns would have been worse. They just fight against liberal idiots online, as if those were authorities. They don’t mention a single, actual authority.

They also equate the idea of a policy (e.g. of imposing a lockdown) with the actuality of the policy. They, like everyone else, mix and match information that we’ve learned over the last two years as if we’d all known these things from the beginning. They disparage Zero-Covid without talking about how China seems to have managed it so far. For two years now. And China is nearly fully vaccinated, so they’re sitting quite pretty.

Looking for a hidden agenda

These two fools are very interesting on other things, but their information and approach is woefully out of touch here. They don’t address anyone who actually knows anything.

They ask what the final agenda is: I don’t think there is one. Countries like Switzerland are just trying to navigate the pandemic without descending into a hospital-free chaos. When Blumenthal says, “they’ve never been forced to face the logical contradictions of their own arguments”, he doesn’t see the irony that neither has he. The subtext of Blumenthal’s argument is that he doesn’t really believe that COVID is dangerous. But then he seems to be arguing for everything to go “back to normal”, that he’s arguing for a return to 100% neoliberalism. I understand that he cares about people, and especially the poor, but I feel like he and Dore aren’t helping here as much as I usually think they do.

They say that the WHO says that it’s going to become endemic. But Blumenthal and Dore don’t know that we can’t make the leap to endemicity without a higher immunization level (either through vaccination or recovery). That’s why there are new lockdowns proposed in some countries and that’s why it’s logical/believable that we’re nearing the end. There are just too many millions of people in the wrong category to let everything rip at once. The hospitals are filling up. It’s not about you, Dore, or you, Blumenthal. The people you claim to be defending are drowning in a sea of patients.

Oh, the whining

Dore: They told me that if I got vaccinated that I could go back to my life. And now they’re telling me that I can’t go back to my life.
Blumenthal: “Yup.””

This ceaseless whining is embarrassing—or it should be. Nature and reality have failed to line up with your simplistic notions of how things should be and now you’re going to throw a tantrum. It’s not about ending it anymore. We missed that chance. Maybe that chance was always a mirage. China doesn’t seem to think so (and their gamble is paying off).

No-one who’s sane is proposing that we have endless lockdowns. Dore and Blumenthal are right about the wealth funneling upward, of course, but that’s a separate issue. Just because people took advantage of the lockdowns to personally profit doesn’t mean that the policy was wrong or that not doing anything would have been better. In a world that sucks, there are no good options.

Social Media rots the brain

They kept talking about information constantly changing. I think that’s an impression you only get when you get your news from idiots on social media. Otherwise, you don’t get the impression that there is any “pinwheeling” of the message.

It’s becoming increasingly evident that a lot of very bright, otherwise useful people are being negatively affected because they spend too much time fighting idiots online. The ease with which they can refute idiots deludes them into thinking that they’ve spent enough time refining their arguments. This is only true on Twitter; in the real world, their arguments sound childish and unformed—or obvious and thus not deserving of the flourish with which they deliver them.

Vaccines and Treatments

Towards the end (~1:04:00), Blumenthal talks about the fact that the vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine, so it’s more like a therapy. Fair enough. The fervent hope was that would have been more of a vaccine, but it’s not. Instead, it only drastically reduces infection (especially when paired with some easy other measures, as long as it’s still circulating) but also even more drastically reduces the danger of this thing. Then Dore and Blumenthal talk about how YouTube makes them say that the vaccines do reduce infection, which they abso-fucking-lutely do, but they’re both so rabbit-holed and mentally damaged from fighting with idiots online that they can’t even see it.

Dore, “Why doesn’t he [Fauci] ever tell you about vitamin D?” Because there is literally no evidence that it works. It’s just online people with no research and no medical background who have self-nominated themselves as experts who believe in all of this stuff. And, of course, someone’s making bank on selling supplements. The whole world would rather believe in fairy tales. Dore and Blumenthal also talk about how “they” are suppressing alternative medications for treatment while promoting vaccines. The vaccine is the best medication. It’s head and shoulders above everything else.

Too Smug

I suppose the part that’s a bit overwhelming is that these two spent 80 minutes stroking each other without once seeming to admit that they weren’t 100% sure of everything they were saying. It was nearly unrelenting smugness, with only occasional respites where you could tell that they really cared about solving the problem—but then they kind of went back to tea-bagging their opponents.

Here’s hoping that they pull back from this kind of content. I generally admire what they do.