Title : How to break programming
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How to break programming
On both the right and the left, people are starting to agree with my position: Coronavirus hysteria -- not the virus itself -- poses a massive threat to this country.Depression-level unemployment levels are likely, and homelessness looms for many. If massive numbers are tossed into the street, the health crisis will worsen, since coronavirus is showing up in shelters.
I never thought I'd agree with an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal, but there are a few decent points in this stew (which, of course, also contains the expected toxic ingredients): By shuttering the economy, we are inflicting enormous pain on ourselves -- and for what gain? The virus is expected to spread despite our best efforts. Evictions and layoffs are horrible for public health.
An increasing number of people are starting to realize that we have veered from one extreme to another -- from a blinkered denial of the problem to a self-destructive over-reaction. Everything I've read has led me to believe that the proper response is, or would have been, four-fold:
1. Subject only the elderly to "social distnacing."
2. Increase testing.
3. Spread public awareness of the dangers.
4. Convince employers to allows lengthy rest-and-recuperation periods for anyone showing flu-like symptoms.
Instead of sticking to those sensible measures, we went from placidity to insanity -- from "There are no meteors" to "The sky is falling!"
A DU comment here makes an important point about the dangers of joblessness:
mental health crisis unlike we've never seen on horizon . If this last for months both suicides and massive mental health problems will ariseThe good news is that the Trump administration is considering the Yang-ish solution of making payments to people in danger of losing all. God, I hope so -- because in this household, we really don't stand a chance otherwise.
What irritates me is the fact that only a populist Republican president is allowed to consider such a measure. If any Dem has said the exact same words, a million libertarians would scream "The Bolshies are coming!" as they marched down Main Street waving around copies of The Road to Serfdom. Somewhere out there, a few honest libertarians may be castigating Mnuchin's proposed cash giveaway. But do "honest libertarians" still exist, or has that phrase become a contradiction in terms? What used to be an ideology (a disagreeable ideology, in my view, but at least intellectually consistent) has become just another weapon wielded by partisan hacks against anyone who doesn't like Trump.
We've seen this movie before. In comments appended to previous posts, I've compared the current hysteria to the insane over-reaction to the AIDS "crisis" of the 1980s. Remember the '80s? We went from an embarrassed denial of the problem to full-out mania.
If you weren't alive then, let me lay out some under-discussed social history for you. This lesson will put the current hysteria into the proper perspective.
Not too long after Ronald Reagan walloped Walter Mondale, a massive propaganda bombardment assured the populace that AIDS was going to KILL EVERYONE IN THE WORLD unless we changed our sinful ways. The disease, we were told, had hit the (male) gay community only by happenstance; soon, soon, the hetero community would be clobbered in massive numbers, and even rubbers weren't protective enough. Little holes, y'see. The only permissible solution was to stop fucking around and settle down with a Life Partner.
In short: Pseudoscience became an all-purpose excuse for moralists to impose monogamy. A very real health problem became just another excuse to wallow in Sexfear.
This propaganda campaign was so pervasive, so successful, that even today some people will become furious with you if you say certain forbidden words. Among those forbidden words: "Lesbians don't get AIDS."
The truth is that they don't. They really don't.
Yes, I am well aware that there is ONE case in which a woman supposedly contracted HIV through sex with another woman. Since the claimant is anonymous, we have no way to judge her truthfulness when she insisted that she never had sex with someone in the high risk categories. I don't believe in Bigfoot, but the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot is at least a thousand times better than the available evidence in favor of the idea of Lesbian-trasmitted AIDS.
"Still, it is theoretically possible that..."
Oh, fuck you.
We've all heard that "theoretical" argument for more than three decades. Epidemiology counts. From a public health perspective, lesbians can party like it's 1979 if they so choose.
Something similar can be said of heterosexual couples, as long as both parties know that their partners are not intravenous drug users and that the male is not a bisexual with a fondness for condom-free anal intercourse.
The idea that oral sex -- giving and receiving, heterosexual and homosexual -- transmits AIDS has always been backed by very iffy anecdotal evidence.
For decades, people have called me a damnable heretic -- or, more charitably, a self-interested party -- whenever I pointed out that you're much more likely to get struck by lightning than to get AIDS from oral sex. But even though I definitely was a self-interested party, statistics back me up: Six thousand lightning deaths per year, versus decades of controversy as to whether even ONE human being has actually gotten AIDS from getting or receiving a blowjob. It's literally safer to drink any random guy's cum than to drink soda from a dispensary at Mickey D's.
(Okay, I'll admit that there may be some other problem with that random guy's spunk; AIDS is not the only STD out there. But AIDS is the topic of my current analogy/rant.)
Yes, yes, I know: Right now you, or at least a few of you, are just dying to mount your highest high horse while delivering that Very Familiar Lecture on the Dangers of HIV. Believe it or not, I've already heard that lecture -- many, many, many times since 1985. But after three and half decades, most of the populace finally understands that predictable sentiments and appeals to middle-class morality cannot overpower scientific fact.
Last I looked, some 70 percent of all AIDS cases trace back to gay men who have practiced anal sex without condoms. The rest are mostly intravenous drug users. Last I looked, only 2.5 percent of the male population is gay, despite a propaganda campaign which has succeeded in convincing many that the percentage is much higher. And males comprise only 50 percent of the overall population.
("The actual number is 49.2 percent! Obviously, you are innumerate and nothing you say must ever be believed!" Oh, fuck you. Pedant.)
Those numbers have stayed the same for decades. In other words, AIDS has been constrained within the same small groups for decades. Despite a reasonably small number of black swan events, the virus is still transmitted almost entirely by needles and unprotected anal sex.
Again: 6000 people are killed by lightning each year. Keep things in perspective.
Today, most people finally understand this truth. The young are doing what they've always done -- what four million years of biology have programmed them to do. They're boinking like crazy while the boinking is good.
The terms "hooking up" and "friends with benefits" have entered our discourse. Seemingly half the entries in the Urban Dictionary indicate a preoccupation with promiscuity. Erica Jong's phrase "zipless fuck" now seems quaint, but such fucks are nevertheless at least as popular now as they were in the 1970s. I think that most of our young fuckers find plastic as unsatisfactory as their parents and grandparents did.
And have the HIV stats skyrocketed as a result? No, they have not. Despite the conventional wisdom of 1985-90, the percentages remain pretty much the same.
We now understand that the propaganda barrage of those years was just that: Propaganda. Moralism. Sexfear. An Id-control mechanism. In the words of Eliza Doolittle's dad: "I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle class morality."
To be accurate, the propagandists of that era were a strange coalition: Middle-class moralists, Bible thumpers, feminists, women eager keep boyfrends/husbands from straying, and gay guys who correctly surmised that screaming "You're next!" was the best way to raise funds for a cure. I didn't blame those gay guys for their part in that coalition. But I never bought into the hype.
Throughout that period, people hated me when I told the truth about AIDS, because what I said conflicted with conventional wisdom.
Today, people hate me for saying that our overreaction to the coronavirus is more dangerous than the virus itself.
Nevertheless, I was right then and I'm right now.
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