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It has nothing to do with elites, though of course its worse to have bad elites than good ones.

It's about the fact that elites have such power and the will to use it. If you want people to be more indifferent to our elites, they can't have the kind of power they have over peoples lives.

The New Right is serious about curtailing the power of the elite, whereas the Tylers of the world have made their peace with it.

I will tackle one small portion of this essay, as COVID is definitely what drove me over the edge and Tylers performance on the issue when it was happening was discrediting.

1) COVID regulations did 10,000x more damage than COVID, with or without vaccines.

2) Most of those regulations were ineffectual, and were known of be ineffectual at the time by anyone looking into it.

3) Despite knowing this many people lied knowingly, complied willingly, and bad mouthed dissenters. Tyler himself did this quite a lot during early COVID, with his only explanation being that one should "read the room" (defer to elite hysteria regardless of the cost).

3a) Those same people endorsed the breaking of these same regulations if it was done in the name of rioting and property damage on behalf of a different hysteria over BLM (which Tyler championed in the early days).

4) After vaccines came out, this hysteria continued for an entire year! A whole year! Tyler was still telling people to mask in early 2022 (and, of course, read the room).

5) The justification for the hysteria continuing after vaccines was a crass attempt to blame the unvaxxed for spreading the virus, even though it was well known by people in the know that it did not stop the spread. Instead, authorities lied knowingly about the nature of the vaccine, claiming it was sterilizing, and using that as justification for continued COVID regulations which could be blamed on the unvaxxed for political gain.

6) In addition, both before and after the vaccine, authorities inculcated an impression in the public that the disease was far deadlier then it was, many thinking that ordinary middle aged people would have something like a 50% chance of hospitalization. It was not unlike how opinions were shaped on the rate of police killings of blacks.

7) This only ended when the Delta and especially Omicron waves made it obvious they lied about the vaccines being sterilizing, and the Democrats suffered large electoral backlash in the November 2021 election. After which they were looking for an exit.

8) Nobody who turned down the vaccine ever tried to regulate my life or prevent me from getting the vaccine. By contrast, my Democratic governor put my sick elderly father so far down the priority list that it took months more to get the vaccine than it should have. I had to wake up at five AM to get an appointment so he could drive three hours to some small town to get it, so that healthy middle aged teachers who refused to open schools could get it first.

9) It seems to me that we have a new "emergency" every ten years or less requiring new coercive powers for the elite. If there is no real emergency, a fake one can be manufactured. Hence, while the next emergency won't be exactly like COVID, I expect it to be handled just as poorly.

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Well stated. How many "intellectuals" took a stand for fully open schools in Fall 2020? Not very many. They read the tea leaves and saw being for open schools put one on the side of Trump, and so they wimped out and regurgitated the lie that grandma would die if junior went to school.

And that is my complaint about centrists. They feign being guided by rational thought but truth is they care about being accepted by the mainstream / elite institutions. There is no greater evidence of this self-serving back patting than the Ivy league being all-in on meaningless Covid mitigations. Apparently there is not much rational thought in America's top universities. And the centrists know it, yet go along with the charade.

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There is always a "better time" to take a stand.

But then all of life becomes waiting to take a stand.

If you only stand up after it's too late to matter, then you don't matter.

And that's basically how I feel that's the real divide between the New Right and Classical Liberals. My kids daycare refused to mask kids even when the government told them too and there were penalties for non-compliance. At the same time Tyler was telling everyone to "read the room." These ordinary people read the room and said "fuck you, we aren't going that to the children."

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There's a lot of myths surrounding the idea that "government forced masks on kids" ala some authoritarian Big Brother. Schooling policy wrt covid mostly tracked local parents' thinking: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2022/04/04/the-real-reason-for-school-closures/

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I've debated Ed Realist on this before, and I didn't find his thesis convincing.

I do agree that deep blue urban areas really and truly wanted their schools closed and kids masked, but such policies got forced on a lot of places that aren't deep blue. If you were in a red area with a blue governor, you got it forced on you without public support. This was the situation of myself and many people I know.

We also found that when people were given a choice, they rarely complied with mandates. It's like that video where the aircraft captain announces that the mask mandate has been lifted and everyone immediately throws their masks off and cheer with joy. There is no genuine support behind the surface. We saw this in the November 2021 elections too, "polling" indicated support for pandemic restrictions, but secret ballots didn't.

But even in those deep blue areas that supported it, now you have the NYTimes running article after article about how people have come to regret how they felt at the time. The people themselves will admit that, looking back, they now see that they were in the midst of a moral panic and made wrong choices that they regret. Part of being a leader is recognizing when the public is giving information you can use and when its just regurgitating your propaganda back at you.

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On point 1: COVID killed ~1,000,000 people. Are you saying wearing a mask, social distancing, and partial closures were the equivalent of 10,000,000,000 deaths? That's 10 billion, or more than the world population.

It's hard to take such hysterical arguments seriously.

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Exactly how many lives did these measures actually save? Masking, social distancing and partial closures were completely ineffective at stopping the spread of COVID, they resulted in saving almost no one! Meanwhile they enormous and real costs that led to and will lead to huge numbers of lives lost. This is in no way a hyperbolic or hysterical claim, it is based on the fact that the mitigations did nothing while costing a huge amount.

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Hyperbolic claim? Yes. But not much.

Consider the actual fatality risk of Covid to children was on the order of zero. I believe children have a ten times greater chance of drowning than of dying due to Covid. We don't force kids to wear a life jacket every day. But we forced kids to wear a facial decoration and even closed their schools. This caused incredible learning loss and mental despair.

For kids, the cost of Covid prevention measures were thousands times greater than the benefit. Actually infinite times greater as there was no benefit to children by the measures taken.

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COVID regulations killed 70 billion people?

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In terms of quality life years lost, I'd say 10,000x is a conservative estimate.

I don't value the last few moments of old sick peoples lives very highly.

I do value the massive hit to quality of life to the rest of us very highly.

If you told me of a person that developed a machine that would allow him to live slightly longer, but at the expense of the happiness of all the worlds children, you would consider it a comic book contrivance. But that's essentially the embodiment of COVID policy.

My father was a very high risk person and he would never do the the children what was done just to slightly extend his life.

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Average number of years lost by those who died of COVID was about 8 or 9 years if I recall, hardly "the last few moments of old sick people". So you think COVID restrictions cost us the equivalent of 560 billion lost years of life? Remember there are only 8 billion people on the planet. That's an average of 70 years of lost life PER PERSON.

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Your argument is wrong. A typical 80 year old might have a life expectancy of 8-9 years (I am just accepting numbers to make the case), but the 80 year-olds dying of COVID, for example, weren't in the healthy cohort of their age group. In every age group, the people who died of COVID were in the lower quintile of health for their age. In short, the QALYs lost were probably 1-3 years for each COVID death. Each death caused by the lock down policies were likely in the range of 10- 70 years.

To summarize- those dying of COVID were significantly less healthy than the average member of their age cohort. If it hadn't been COVID, it would have been something else inside of 3 years.

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Show me the studies, dummy. You think they didn't take this into account? They did.

And remember, the claim was not "10-25x as bad" it was LITERALLY 10,000x AS BAD.

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In addition to my comment below about QALY and how much to value these deaths, we need to ask a question about how many lives these regulations saved and what the cost of them was.

As far as I can tell, the number of lives saved by these regulations was a rounding error at best. Death rates in the freestest areas (say Scandinavia) are virtually identical to the areas with harshest restrictions.

So the correct comparison isn't all covid deaths, but that small fraction of COVID deaths that were actually prevented by the actions taken.

Only two types of responses prevented deaths in any serious way. One is if you were an isolated country far from the rest of the world and locked yourself off before the virus got in. In this case, you were able to avoid some pre-vaccine deaths, but post-vaccine deaths remained basically the same, as you have to open up sometime. In the US, we have had more deaths post vaccine than pre vaccine. This path could only be pursued by a handful of countries

The other is to go full China. I have a hard time believing that what China has done with COVID has increased total human flourishing. In fact, it may be the single most harmful thing an individual has done in my recent memory.

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The QALY number you quote is lifted directly from the average expected remaing life-span of the age group of the deceased. It does not account for the specifics of the deceased beyond his age group, dumbass.

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Yes.

Also, if you’ve been around dying people, QALY are not all equal.

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False, QALYs are by definition adjusted for quality of life.

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You've got the wrong multiplier. How many people did the COVID interventions save? There is strong reason to think that lockdowns saved almost no one. Meanwhile there were enormous loss of life (through denial of care and reduced economic opportunity). Therefore it's extremely plausible that the negative impact of lockdowns was of that magnitude.

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As I said, 10,000x worse may be conservative. Lockdowns probably killed more people than they saved.

But even if they did save a few lives, what lives and at what cost?

I'm just not particularly obsessed with mere life for life's sake. How we live is more important.

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Exactly! There was zero serious consideration of the cost or benefit of any of these measures. The benefits were simply asserted without any evidence or real precedent.

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Brian writes "I agree that most of the vaccine skepticism and the election conspiracy theories are fairly stupid."

This is a very revealing statement, not just of Brian's bias but of the nature of the social and political challenge. There are stupid theories. There are also claims concerning Covid shots and 2020 American election procedures that are factual and raise serious concerns.

My observation is many who do not want to consider the real problems with Covid shots and with the 2020 election rely on the characterization of concerns as "conspiracies" and "stupid" to give themselves cover. Many people who go this route may simply lack confidence they can discern truth from fiction and they do not want to side with the "crazies". So they voice complaint against the Boogeyman of the "crazies" to prove they are not them.

What are those who have studied these issues and understand there are valid concerns to make of "intellectuals" who prove themselves to be ignorant or apathetic? This is why there is growing disdain for the intellectual class. This is why "centrists" find themselves under attack . The centrists want to believe the fiction that in large social disputes, the factual truth is owned by them or their institutions. But this is not the case with the vaccines or with the 2020 voting.

The hope would be "centrists" would recognize the validity of real concerns and support resolving them. What is fascinating in regards to Covid is European centrists have been much quicker to update their point of view, such as opposing universal Covid vaccinations. But US centrists do not want to get out in front of the Agenda. And so they follow the political winds. Perhaps this is good career management, but it also means America's centrists are cowards and we know it.

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As world wide scientific knowledge exponentially increases, and the interactions between our social lives and the technology grow stronger, the number of individuals with critical knowledge and skills is dramatically increasing. The utilization of the economic advantages of "trade and specialization" distributes real power, as we move towards expanding specialization.

The very concept of the elite implies that they know more and are able to make better decisions in the face of complexity. However, the age of the Renaissance Man even being possible passed long ago: even the smartest person in the world doesn't know the boundaries of human knowledge. Our elite are only elite in their own minds, (or in their own narrow fields) as they struggle and fail to understand the complexity of the modern world.

Much of our elite of today spout nonsense, since they permit themselves to opine about areas in which their knowledge, if it exists at all, is absurdly limited. They are either truly ignorant of scientific reality and knowledge, or they are merely manipulators of other peoples' emotions and contribute nothing of significance to the progress of humanity.

Fundamentally, the concept of an omniscient elite is a false one. There are elites, of course, but only in very specific terms. The general state of knowledge is too complex to be limited by elites in tiny areas given megaphones to spread dubious knowledge.

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They are elite because they can be trusted to say and support the right things.

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However, if you say and support the "right things" you are just following and not leading.

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Cowen knew what he was writing when he wrote that sentence about elites. At his core he understands that our leaders today are incompetent and dangerously so, but those leaders are people he has supported fully for going on the last 10 years. He is a man trying to deny culpability.

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You don't understand the "New Right" because you also don't understand the right at all. It was clergyman Mather Byles who said “Which is better: to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?” , and William F. Buckley, Jr. who said “I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.”

An oligarchy, such as we are evolving into, requires rule by angels. Our supposed elites might be more intelligent than the average member of society; but they are not more moral. Arguably the desire for power is fundamentally a selfish desire, and therefore immoral. Our "betters" may justify their rule by claiming enlightened benevolence, but they mean to rule regardless.

The fundamental difference between leftists and rightists is that the former believe in perfectability and utopias, while the latter understand entropy; that it takes unending effort to maintain functionality, whether in persons or societies.

Another distinction is most of our elites don't have "skin in the game"; they don't suffer the consequences of their actions. If the elites and their families had to make up government deficits from their own resources, and accommodate migrants in their own homes; and be replaced in university admissions and lucrative employment by diversity hires; there would be different policies in place

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Perhaps we need to discuss scale - national elites, local elites, global elites?

Perhaps the NR believes in the potential of globally superior cultures populated with truly valuable local elites; but at the 'very large nation' scale, do not believe a trustworthy coherent elite can exist.

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You want to see a CL elite suddenly become NR?

Senator Thune when he found out Google was "throttling" his emails for fundraising and GOTV efforts suddenly rages like he's an election denier! How dare these tech firms do this!

LOL, funny when its YOUR emails and YOUR money, suddenly you care and don't shrug your "private firms can do whatever they like" shoulders.

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Tyler should talk about Russiagate Hoax. Why should I trust FBI DOJ Media Democratic Party elites again?

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