Nate Silver

Banal observation. But as the center of gravity on COVID restrictions has shifted toward more of a risk-mitigation approach—a change I think is long overdue, BTW—it's telling that the fringes have also shifted toward more extreme positions. pic.twitter.com/6GQ2lEZXe2

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 27, 2021

Well, yes.  As expected if we remember Scott Siskind's Toxoplasma of Rage, which I have commented on many times over the last few years. I have called it the best essay of the 21st C, but I think even he has exceeded it a few times since then.

But back to Silver.  Even though I am off all political media except what I run into at my small circle of friends (I am still reading the headlines and sometimes reading your comments, even if I do not click the links), I have the same sense myself.  The people who were originally nervous that we might be underestimating the danger of Covid moved to insisting on every possible lockdown and precaution, and are now furious that you people who have stopped wearing masks are literally killing people. Even the vaccinated ones, apparently. I wear a mask often because stores require it, and I think it is simply polite not to make other people nervous when they don't know my level of safety.  But I'm wearing it less and less, and find no guilt in this. People are entirely safe around me and I am simply treating their anxiety now. I get it that teachers are conditioned by decades of personal experience that "students are disease farms" - which is true - and have not been able to get over that in terms of schools reopenings.  And that includes those who would have less work with everything open, but still somehow can't feel safe. (That goes back to a lack of science and math training for educators in general, but that's another story.) But the others are just pearl-clutching. We know more than we did a year ago, and school opening is not dangerous.

On the other hand we see people doubling down that masks and distancing were never useful, and we should have been open all along, and it's all just a dry run for further ordering the sheeple into pens. Data doesn't seem to affect these people much either.  I have some here, and if you think you have any tendency toward those thoughts, go over to worldometers and look at the graphs state-by-state, and you will see we were heading toward zero, but as individual states opened up, the number of cases stopped decreasing and sometimes even went back up. This, even with vaccinations well under weigh. So the graphs you see right before your eyes will tell you that (gulp) gee, masks and distancing do have some effect, don't they?  Because what else is there to explain those numbers? That doesn't stop sites from cherry-picking data that "NEW STUDY SAYS MASKS ARE USELESS."  Which the studies don't but you can squint really hard, or pretend that government requirements = real mask use. 

Advocating that we should have just "lived with" the deaths and opened up last April anyway is a different discussion.  But pretending we would have not had many more deaths - hey, maybe even that 2 million that the skeptics have been sneering at the "so-called experts" for predicting, now that we are over 600K - has no basis in fact. But it still has a basis on the internet of people not only insisting they were right all along, but even that they didn't go far enough. They seem to have forgotten that the rest of us have been here all along, reading them over the last fifteen months. We know what you wrote, and we know the general reliability of the sources you quoted then and now. A reminder: Advocacy sites are suspicious.  Not necessarily wrong or without value, but suspicious.

Now people are quadrupling and octuplying down that the those who have been vaccinated are carrying some dread disease to the noble ones who refused this "experimental government vaccination." A further level of insanity. Hopefully that one just peters out soon.

Increasing polarisation in both language and in assertions.  The Toxoplasma of Rage.