Americans Who Approve of China’s Ghastly Lockdown . . .

Nellie Bowles writes:

China’s obsession with Zero-Covid: Chinese authorities have taken a brutal stance on Covid: They have welded people into their own apartments and locked building exit doors. Last week, an apartment fire killed 10 in China’s Xinjiang province, and many say the dead were locked in their building and fire trucks were slowed by road blocks that were the result of the draconian Covid rules. The result has been unprecedented protests across the country. In Beijing, people chanted “no to Covid tests, yes to freedom.”

Some on the American left were quick to defend the CCP. Being welded into your apartment, having all the exits locked in a fire, these are just the price of safety. One particularly wild example: When the Washington Post ran a news story about the CCP’s flawed Zero-Covid response, the paper’s most famous reporter, Taylor Lorenz, slammed her employer’s phrasing and defended the CCP. “Choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing) isn’t a ‘critical flaw,’” Lorenz wrote.

I do have good news for America’s Pandemic Forever advocates: You’ve won. Yes, a few people still go to the movies, and you can always tweet about how selfish and evil they are. But take a look at this chart . . .

→ Americans’ staggering loneliness: We were already spending more and more time alone each year. Then Covid hit, and our isolation grew much deeper. Our social lives haven’t bounced back.

I got emphatic pushback when I agreed with Glenn Greenwald (in August 2021) that our COVID policies need to be based on sober cost-benefit analyses, the same type of analyses we use when we discuss traffic safety. I think it's clear that Taylor Lorenz has convinced many people that more lockdown is the best policy, but she (and her ilk) are ignoring the exponentially greater damage that lockdowns have caused.

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YouTube Censors Matt Orfalea’s Completely Truthful Video

Matt Taibbi writes:

Matt Orfalea didn't lie, alter clips, or remove key context. He made edits faithful to reality and just got a strike for it. Welcome to post-Trump America, where truth is a censorable offense.
This is our New Rule: Only Democrats can deny that elections are not legitimate.

See Taibbi's entire distressing article: "Election Denial" for Me, But Not for Thee: YouTube Censors TK-Produced Videos, Again, Despite Factual Accuracy."

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Tulsi Gabbard Blasts Gender Ideology

Tulsi Gabbard now has a show. In this episode, Gabbard makes a powerful case that many teachers and medical professionals are betraying and permanently harming our children. The first 12 minutes of this video including video of many of these professionals spouting dangerous gender ideology. This includes several doctors who work at Boston Children's Hospital.

At minute 12, Tulsi talks with Chloe Cole, a young women who got caught up in gender ideology, At the encouragement of others, she came to believe that she was a boy named Leo at the age of 13. Two years later, she underwent a double mastectomy. After the surgery, Chloe felt a deep sense of regret. On November 10, Chloe announced that she had secured attorneys to bring a lawsuit against those who misled her.

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The Biggest Dangers of Tribes

What should you make of the fact that you are passionate about your position on an issue?

Is that passion justified by real world facts and a careful and conscious cost/benefit analysis? Or did unconsciously adopt your position as a result of becoming a member of a tribe? Did social pressures and desires nullify your intellectual defenses to bullshit, allowing rickety beliefs to find a welcoming space in your head? Did you aggressively attack your new position, making sure that it is solid? Or did it slip in like the trojan horse after your sentries became completely distracted by their cravings to be liked (and not disliked) by others? After all, because called "inappropriate" "misguided," "a tool for the [bad people]" or "racist" hurts, especially when done in public arenas. Those slings and arrows take a toll and they have put Americas institutions at great risk. It takes a special person to be able to shake off those accusations and stay true your need to hyper-scrutinize all issues, especially your own position on those issues.

It takes courage and strength to constantly attack your own ideas and it needs to be constant because truth-seeking is never-ending work. And it's not enough to try as hard as you can to be skeptical of your own ideas, because we are blind to the problems with our own thought process.

We know this for sure, based on the work of many scientists who have studied the confirmation bias, including Jonathan Haidt:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

From The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

You can't cure this problem alone. You need to expose yourself to viewpoints you find distasteful or even odious. That is the only solution because the confirmation bias is that strong. You cannot see the problem as long as you are clinging only to your favorite sources of information. You need quit being a coward and engage with people and ideas that challenge you. You need to visit websites and read books that you would rather not. That is your only chance to test your ideas, identify those that work and don't work. This need to constantly expose your thoughts to the marketplace of ideas was described with precision by John Stuart Mill (and see here). Recently, Jonathan Rauch has taken a deep dive on this challenge in his excellent book, The Constitution of Knowledge.

There will be many who read this who say "I'm not concerned because I am immune to both dumb things and the pressures of tribes." They are wrong to be complacent for two reasons.

Reason One: People think they are immune because they feel certain that they have things right. They feel this way even though ALL OF US change our opinions over time. We are guaranteed to change our views in the future just as we have in the past, but we don't remember how much we change over time.  We simply sit there smug and certain that we've got things figured out at each present moment. What is that feeling of certainty worth? Nothing, as explained by Robert Burton, in his book, On Being Certain.

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How the CIA Convinces Lazy Journalists to do its Bidding

Ed Snowden: "The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. The entire thing is much longer, but *entirely* worth the watch. The government sued Snepp in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled intelligence workers had to submit any statement for censorship, even those unrelated to secrets."

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