Writes the essayist/novelist Natasha Stagg, one of many contributors to "Future Cringe/One day we’ll look back on this moment and wonder: What were we thinking?" (NYT).
I love the big question, what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future? I noticed this question when I was a child and heard things said about people in the past, as if those people were benighted and ridiculous. We are those people to people somewhere out there in the future. How can I avoid being looked at by them the way people today are looking at the people of the past?
One answer is to be more charitable to the people of the past. Realize that some day you'll be in their position, and don't you want those future people to be charitable toward you? Embarrassment is over-worried about. Maybe those people in the future are looking back at us and laughing about how prudish and uptight we were to think of them feeling embarrassed about us. That is, one day we'll look back and be embarrassed the we were embarrassed.
Paradoxically, the avoidance of embarrassment is the most embarrassing thing of all. Worrying that you will cringe is unnecessary pre-cringing.
As I've said, I've thought about this question since I was a child. I was, I think, too influenced by the vision of "Future Me" feeling embarrassed about whatever it was I was considering doing now. But I agree with the writer, Natasha Stagg, that we ought to get some perspective on our narrow-minded irrationality, and I don't think I'm being inconsistent. I'm for individuality and freedom.
Posts
117 comments:
"Now that left-wing overreaction is politically damaging to Democrats, we need a way to ignore talking about how horribly wrong the left was about lockdowns, mask mandates and vax mandates."
Conspicuously missing from the list of "future cringe" is giant irrational mountain called "Social Justice."
"I love the big question, what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future? I noticed this question when I was a child and heard things said about people in the past, as if those people were benighted and ridiculous. We are those people to people somewhere out there in the future."
Hillary might have some insight. Talk about cringe!
This reminded me of something Andy Warhol once said:
When a person is the beauty of their day, and their looks are really in style, and then the times change and tastes change, and ten years go by, if they keep exactly their same look and don't change anything and if they take care of themselves, they'll still be a beauty.
Schrafft's restaurants were the beauties of their day, and then they tried to keep up with the times and they modified and modified until they lost all their charm and were bought by a big company. But if they could just have kept their same look and style, and held on through the lean years when they weren't in style, today they'd be the best thing around. You have to hang on in periods when your style isn't popular, because if it's good, it'll come back, and you'll be a recognized beauty once again.
"I love the big question, what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future?"
The trans movement. The deification of the climate. The non stop vilification of Donald Trump. Greta Thurnberg. The Kardashians. Post modernism. The co-opting of our major media outlets. The war in Ukraine. The Biden family. Democrats. Wind and solar. 81 million voters.( to be fair they are an embarassement now.)
I'm sur there are more that you can name.
I think it's pretty obvious that giving double mastectomies and hysterectomies to 12 year old girls, cutting out sections of skin from their arms to give them fake male-reminiscent genital like objects, and giving castrations to 12 year old boys, scooping out their lower abdomen and pumping them full of estrogen, followed by facial reconstruction for "feminization", is ripe for future "embarrassment"
We bring up this issue a lot, just not in a good way. "Future historians will say, 'blah blah [insert whatever suits my needs right now] blah blah."
But there's no real introspection about it because most of us assume we will be proven right.
Open borders. Immigration reform.
Masks that offer false security and increase infections.
Sequestration of healthy populations with forward-looking collateral damage, including developmental retardation.
Planned parent/hood with "benefits" in several sanctuary states.
Non-sterilizing shots distributed to the general population through misinformation, disinformation, and force.
Denial of medical care and treatments.
Social media and especially smartphones post iPhone (2007) led to this 'failure to launch' generation. When you are watching everyone on your phone 24/7 and being watched 24/7 it's hard to (1) develop any sort of independent ideas, (2) be tough enough to function on your own, and (3) forgive and forget when the Internet never forgets and rarely forgives.
We've got a generation of anxiety-driven totalitarian prudes and jerks because they never passed middle-school cafeteria rules. Cool kids table. Cooties. Cliques. Then, Trump fed their deepest anxieties by breaking every avoidance-driven taboo and thereby blocked whatever tiny capacity they had for rational thought. COVID happened after their brains were frozen in the anti-Trump panic, and after the left and right Trump opposition opened the doors to every liar and psychopath in an effort to beat Trump (or merely demonstrate professional competence...when they often had none).
Who's got their finger on the nuke button? Biden? Some shadow regent? Who will have their finger on the nuke button when the failure to launch generation reaches maturity? They'll launch at that time...?
Everybody thinks they're living in modern times. Except for the post-modernists, who tried to leapfrog that whole situation. Now, even post-modernism is safely part of the past. Speaking for myself, I have to say that it feels awfully good to be back in modern times. So normal.
"Also, how every single thing in our lives — even what music we listen to and what art we see — you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda."
Gee, can I hazard a guess as to which political party politicized everything in our lives? All I want is to be left alone. I don't watch the NFL to see Colin Kaepernick kneeling. I don't watch NHL for PRIDE night.
Back to the topic at hand. Embarrassed? The left is never embarrassed or shamed. Think Gov. Whitmer (D-Commie-Pinko) will be shamed for not permitting physicians to prescribe certain drugs to treat Covid? Heck no. She would be re-elected again if they waived term limits.
I had an older father and he was in the pacific as a 25 year old during WWII. Japense internment and dropping two atomic bombs on civilian targets. He did not want to talk about either, but would just say unless you lived through that time you cannot possibly understand.
When I walk the beach in San Diego, I count people w/ masks. So far 47 people w/ masks and 41 were women. For the most part, it was women who bought the fear being sold, lock stock and barrel.
There she be more references to credentialed morons in the future. Name the and shame them.
Worrying about people who aren’t even alive yet, is one way some people deflect from coming to terms with the people “they” harmed with “their” irracional indulgences. (I put those pronouns in quote to mean I’m not referencing any one person in particular)
"It makes people go a little crazy and become conspiracy theorists or just totally isolated from all of their friends."
This just the first generation. The second generation never has any friends who don't think exactly like they do.
This won't be cringe-worthy like bad fashion but rather the manifestation of the darkest side of humanity. A psychopath does an end around government checks and balances to create a monster virus, then his government orchestrates a cure that will likely be more deadly than the disease...
Worse than Hitler will not be hyperbole...
Well if the NYT crowd weren't do hellbent on ghosting, cutting off forever!! anyone the least bit conservative MAYBE we could talk.
But I think looking back the most cringe thing will be gender ideology, "medical transition,""top surgery" and "bottom surgery" and all the pronoun BS. If not the porn and trafficking.
Wise men used to say we needed war to clean out the depravity but I'm afraid wars only make it worse.
"You hand in your ticket
And you go watch the geek
Who immediately walks up to you
When he hears you speak
And says, “How does it feel
To be such a freak?”
And you say, “Impossible”
As he hands you a bone"
"I think we’re probably going to be embarrassed by the pandemic, every kind of reaction to it and the way it’s sort of defined our time."
But not enough for a public accounting, with our overlords taking actual responsibility for their errors.
"I feel embarrassed about being a little irrational about certain topics and the politicization of every single thing that happened in that whole time period"
But not sufficiently embarrassed to vote against the politicians to abetted her embarrassing attitudes, or to avoid doing it again when next round of prog hysteria breaks out.
"how people handled their own health was a political topic. And that just doesn’t make rational sense."
She says after the fact. While supporting policies that do the opposite. Talk about cringe.
"you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda. I think that will eventually feel embarrassing"
A certain prog agenda. Eventually, when? Several items in the cringe feature illustrate the opposite: we'll eventually cringe at the idea of not being able to have two spouses, driving gasoline cars, eating meat, cooking indoors with gas, etc. Cringe is another prog tool, an expression of hegemony.
Althouse: "I'm for individuality and freedom"
I believe it. But I don't believe many people are.
Please clarify your statement in para 5, beginning "Paradoxically . . ."
I think I can interpret it, but want to be sure.
As for charity toward the people of the past, that boat has sailed: you have to know something about them first, and most people don't, by preference and social and educational policy.
"what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future"
I think about this a lot.
I think speech prudishness could go either way. Things could become more free, or we could end up in totalitarian surveillance techno states where today's strictures would be indistinguishable from perfectly free speech. "These barbarians said whatever they wanted without regard to precious social cohesion?!"
Right now, I think the biggest one will be abortion. I think future people will probably look at elective abortion like we look at slavery. "They ripped babies into pieces because people didn't want to deal with them?!"
A less serious one:
The current plastic surgery/filler look often appears kind of grotesque and monstrous, even in cases where people say it's been done well.
Related from Babylon Bee: https://babylonbee.com/news/report-everyone-from-your-2nd-grade-class-still-thinks-about-the-time-your-fly-was-down-and-laughs-at-you-every-day
I remember being told we would be embarrassed by Reagan’s Cold War antics, yet his actions broke the Soviet Union and freed Eastern Europe such that we even care what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.
If the discussion is reaction to Covid, well then there is fertile ground. Remember when Democrats claimed Trump was racist for suspending air travel to highly infected areas and instead we should celebrate the lunar new year? Or the week Fauci went from go ahead and enjoy your planned Spring Break, but now quarantine for 14 days to lower the curve? Or Democrats that refused the jab because Trump was still President? But those hardly compare to how willingly Americans joined the global movement to give up individual rights for the societal good of the many.
Much of what I've done or thought in the past I regard as unfortunate, but I'm not embarrassed. After all, I'm just some guy. But most new public art is and should be shortly thought of as embarrassing, and the responsibility for it does not lay with some randos.
Abortion. Thinking that it is okay to kill our children will someday be viewed just as we view people who thought it was okay to own another person.
This might touch on previous discussion, here, I think, of the dangers of "presentism."
I don't have a subscription for the article, but I suspect most people will say 'future generations will look back in embarrassment that [view opposed to mine] existed.'
Stagg's observation, "how every single thing in our lives — even what music we listen to and what art we see — you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda. I think that will eventually feel embarrassing," seems spot on.
Or, it's just wishful thinking on my part because it reflects my present view.
Cats are aloof because they're embarrassed remembering what they did as kittens.
“Worrying that you will cringe is unnecessary pre-cringing.” This.
This line of thinking, as laid out by NYT and (I hope ironically) developed by you, strikes me as neurotic. Woody Allen-level neurotic. Amusing in small controlled doses but catastrophic if overindulged.
We can’t know what future people will think of us. We can leave them letters explaining ourselves but these will be as absurd, laughable and pathetic as everything else we may leave them. Better by far to just live your “best life” and let the future take care of itself.
Richard Feynman wrote a great little book. The title was perfect: “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
Most embarrassing is how we let all of the petty tyrants take away our freedom
Most embarrassing is how we let all of the petty tyrants take away our freedom
1. In the concluding episode of Douglas Murray's "Uncancelled History" he states that it is a bad idea to judge people in the past based upon today's standards. This is true especially re: Founding Fathers and slavery.
2. Right now we need to have a *conversation* about how the Left was totally and completely wrong about all things covid.
The Left needs to admit its stupidity and exceptionally bad judgment.
Our society will be paying the price for the Left's insanity on this for decades.
"One day we’ll look back on this moment and wonder: What were we thinking?" (NYT).
One day??? You were being told from the beginning you were acting disgracefully, you nutbags.
We're an embarrassing species that combines intelligence and stupidity as a two sided coin we carry around.
My particular future fave cringe?
Arresting solitary surfers...
The comment Althouse quotes is partly about politicizing everything.
Most of the other comments are purely politicized--some version of, "The right will be embarrassed to have existed."
"I'm for individuality and freedom."
When you and I were growing up it was, I believe, the liberal position. I posit that's why you became a liberal. But your fellow travelers on the left have left you behind. They now believe in authoritarianism and rigidity as Natasha Stagg notes: "how every single thing in our lives — even what music we listen to and what art we see — you have to align yourself with a certain political agenda."
"What were we thinking?"
This embarrassing regret belongs to suburban Karens and virtue signaling liberals and their sheep.
Natasha Stagg - I'd be embarrassed to. But please speak for yourself.
Who's "we" white woman??
I've been (and millions of others) calling the response to the "pandemic" bullshit since March of 2020. I've got the receipts. From the Spring 2020 WI election where they told us us "if you vote in person you're risking you're life"...to understanding the nursing home deaths were not accidental, to the bloated classification of COVID "deaths", the cruelty imposed on children, and of course the ineffective and dangerous "vaccine".
If you didn't figure out it was all bullshit when the Wuhan Wet Market re-opened in Spring of 2020 while the US and the Western World were locking down...they already had you at hello.
I do not find this comforting. There are now permanent family and friendship splits, I know those people I cared about got the mRNA shots and probably boosted too. So are their kids.
They posted it on FB for everyone to see, with their masked family Christmas photo. And they lectured everyone about "killing your grandma" and being "selfish" protecting your freedom. They openly accused people in their communities of being "super-spreaders" and supported boycotts of local businesses that thought remaining shut down was complete selective bullshit. And the loudest ones in my community...were public school teachers.
It even went so far as to suggest the "unvaccinated" be put at the bottom of any type of triage. Jimmy Kimmel said don't treat the "unvaccinated" and let them die. And liberal Karens applauded. Many...VERY highly credentialed Karens.
Now they have no idea what type of mRNA dose they received and how their bodies will react to the spike proteins going forward. Now they are embarrassed and have regret. Probably a little worry too.
Wishing everyone who took the shots the best results. Especially the people who just did it to travel, see loved ones, keep a job rather than go broke... God Bless you.
But for the education establishment, and the people who injected these mRNA shots into a child...you have to live with that. Some have not yet reversed course of mRNA mandates. Like The University of Wisconsin.
I have wondered if future generations will view abortion - especially abortions after the fetus had developed into somethin recognizable as a baby - as dehumanizing as we now view slavery. Maybe, maybe not. It's also possible, in a world with more people, life will become less precious. Or will be weighted even more in favor of those that have been born and those who are pre-birth, or otherwise dependent - will beome more expendable.
I'm pretty sure people will think we handled the pandemic poorly. They'll have the advantage of knowing our future. I hope they will recognize the politicization. Right now, I think people might tend to see it on the other side but not so much on their own. They won't be able to understand why we acted as though the risk was the same for everyone even though it was clear that it was greater for people with pre-existing conditions (especially obesity).
The only people who need to be embarassed are the ones who mask-shamed people outside and some distance away. And politicians who used it for gain.
"Embarrassed" is for when you do something like ask a woman when the baby's due and she tells you she's not pregnant.
Destroying peoples' livelihoods and ending the careers of good people, and having them arrested for surfing alone on a California beach or beaten up by police officers and security guards is something else entirely.
"I love the big question, what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future?"
So many things, so little time...
Translation from the NYT: Many of you fucked up: you trusted us. Many of us screamed that those who didn't follow the plan be outcast from society, ranging from losing jobs, banned from travel, socially mocked, imposing fees that would bankrupt you, take your kids away etc etc...
However, now we are seeing that society has continued on all right, but we are now seeing "unexplained" death spikes among under 45s so before we roll back entirely we want to go ahead and bury the hatchet and convince you dopey right wingers to fall back to "OK you get away with it this time but NEXT time there will be consequences!"
No. It is not moral to allow one side to always retreat until next time. The moral solution, the solution that *actually* will prevent the busy bodies from running your life into the ground next time they get the chance, is to punish them for trying to do so. It's not moral to laugh off their bad intentions.
You don't let someone get away with firing a gun at your head on the grounds that the bullet missed.
"I love the big question, what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future? "
Everything in there looks a lot more like what the writers are embarrassed about now and wish others would be too. Maybe it's a failure of imagination?
I remember driving by the Hospital in Menomonee Falls, WI a few times in 2020. It was during the period of time when they were telling us the Hospitals were being overrun and cancer treatments and elective surgeries were being pushed out. The place was always a ghost town with an empty parking lot. The make-shift hospital at the Wisconsin State Fair Grounds was empty.
Nurses were posting line dancing videos on Tik-Tok, Twitter, and FB. The main Waukesha Hospital even had a firetruck parade go by to celebrate all the heroes that worked there. Really? An overrun hospital had time to get everyone outside for a self-celebrating parade?? Cringe.
They convinced people to not believe their lying eyes, and ignore their own instincts, or be rejected from the hive.
In 2020 and 2021, stubborn independence, cynicism, mistrust of authority, and Occom’s Razor turned out to be the most useful of all tools. Much better than conformity, belief in the benevolence of the powerful, and obedience.
We will all make embarrassing mistakes when put in situations with incomplete and/or incorrect information. It can't be helped. When COVID came, we didn't know how bad it was going to be, how quickly it would spread, if it could be contained at all, how to treat it, etc. This is all unfortunate but, to a certain extent, unavoidable.
The bigger problem, if you will, is the authorities who we relied upon to get this information and communicate it to us were often outright liars who were motivated by politics, personal profit, covering their own failures, or, in some cases, outright cruelty. The even bigger problem is a sizeable portion of the population lionizes these people, even now, and are not embarrassed at all. Embarrassment requires the ability to self-reflect and feel shame, traits that are missing in far too many persons.
We are led by useless elites. This never ends well.
For society's sake, I hope the author is right.
Heaping ridicule on crazy fads is something that Americans do pretty well. There's going to be plenty of that a decade from now.
"I think we’re probably going to be embarrassed by the pandemic"
I doubt it. We'll just be on to the new current thing and the new current thing after that, all the while feeling smug and superior to our fellow citizens.
Life in the Permacrisis.
Unless we do something about how we're being manipulated.
People use "the past" for present purposes all the time, it's part of human nature. Often they'll use it in a 'good old days' sense (I've called this 'pastopianism') to show how we've deteriorated since. Or they'll use it in the opposite sense to show how virtuous we are now compared to those people.
Having said that, there's no forgiveness on my part for all the pandemic @ssh**es who shamed everyone for not obeying their ignorant and anti-science views on what to do.
Embarrassed?
If only that were all it is.
I will be more embarrassed that Biden is actually the president. People in history are REALLY going to laugh at us about that fraud. (and why we are permitting it to go on and on and on, whilst he opened the border up wide, and the illegals are now demanding us to give them a better life, taxpayer funded of course)
I look back at 2020 and miss it. I can't be alone in this. I miss its bizarreness. The grocery shopping; I used to put all our stuff out in the sun long enough to disinfect. But not so long it could spoil. What an operation.
And all those hikes in parks, out in the country. Remember when no one was driving on the roads?
The odd stuff that seemed necessary made for a unique year. Then I got the thing in early 2021 and, once I realized I was going to be fine in the end, it was a relief. And turned out to be a wonderful asset as I felt no need whatsoever to consider the mRNAs.
The war on energy will be the most embarrassing memory, providing we survive it.
Does Stagg admit any mistakes she made, or is it all just her trying to not mention those mistakes she made and supported, and now is trying to convince everyone to stop trying to settle accounts? I suspect it is a case, "Let's not bicker and argue over 'ooo' killed 'ooo'", but can't see behind the paywall.
I still think about the hypothetical world where Shelob won the presidency in 2016, and because she isn't Trump, the CDC and the rest of the Deep State bureaucracy would have fought tooth and nail to not lock down over half the country and close all the schools. We would have, of course, still been stuck with attempted mask mandates and vaccine mandates since Democrats can't help but be Democrats, but I think political self-preservation would have prevented all the really economically destructive stuff that was almost certainly done to defeat the big Orange Ogre.
There was a percentage of the population that refused to become hysterical and simply continued to live their lives.
They gave minimal compliance while at the same time offering little resistance.
I have a name for these people. It’s called “normal”
I’ve decided (at least for me) that when the screaming is the loudest I must be the calmest.
‘“One answer is to be more charitable to the people of the past.”? No way! I want to cancel a 45 y.o. Conservative for a tweet his 16 yo self wrote!!!!’
— Taylor Lorenz (or, well, pick you ‘’’’’favorite’’’’’ lefty PR … err, pardon, … journalist.
Those TikTok nurses should be embarrassed for sure.
Because when the pandemic finally reached their town and their floor they were busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
meanwhile, Major News Figures say: It's OKAY to LIE, to get your point across!
“Objectivity Has Got To Go”: News Leaders Call for the End of Objective Journalism
while Bob Woodword and others have finally admitted that the Russian collusion coverage lacked objectivity and resulted in false reporting, media figures are pushing even harder against objectivity as a core value in journalism.
In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.”
He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.”
Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”
Whose 'morality'? The Left's? Stalin's? Hitler's? The Pope's?
Serious Question: IF you're ADVOCATING, that YOUR paper be able to lie, slander, and fabricate..
WHY are you complaining about the dangers of 'disinformation'??
I'm just joshing! That's Not a serious question.
Everybody knows, that: If it's GOOD for your side to lie..
It's GOOD to be OUTRAGED when pretending that the other side is doing it too
Thousands of people standing about holding up their iphones to get some exciting video at riots or beatdowns at Waffle House and such will be seen as embarrassing. Substituting a digital record for an actual experience will be understood as an un-sophisticated Early Digital Age response.
Michael K said...
"The war on energy will be the most embarrassing memory, providing we survive it."
"How dare you!" Saint Greta.
Michael K nails it with his comment about the insane war on energy. That one will be "embarrassing", and deadly, and civilization threatening.
Someone mentioned Richard Feynman's book What Do You Care What Other People Think. Love the book. Feynman is a hero of mine. My two boys and I were once driving from Phoenix to Albuquerque and I decided to go via Globe/Miami instead of taking I-17 to I-10. We were so wrapped up in listening to the book as I drove that I went wrong at some point and the next thing we knew we were looking at the observatory up on top of Mount Grahm and thinking "this can't possible be right". It took almost 18 hours to drive to Albuquerque... I still wouldn't name either of my boys Dick.
And finally, no one knows a goddamn thing about how covid and it's ill fated vaccines will play out, but it seems everyone is a fucking expert. Please just shut the fuck up, both sides. The die is cast. Some of us will live long enough to find out how things work out. None of us knows shit at this time.
Sorry for the rude comment.
@Kay
"Schrafft's restaurants were the beauties of their day, and then they tried to keep up with the times and they modified and modified until they lost all their charm and were bought by a big company. But if they could just have kept their same look and style, and held on through the lean years when they weren't in style, today they'd be the best thing around. You have to hang on in periods when your style isn't popular, because if it's good, it'll come back, and you'll be a recognized beauty once again."
Wow, I'm not a Warhol fan, but what a great line. And true. One of the most heartbreaking things that you could've seen - before Reddit started pruning such posts to shit - was the trend about 5-6 years ago where people were posting the before/after college photos of high school girls going to college. Beautiful, even stunning girls going out of their way to uglify and trash themselves for reasons that all of us still debate to this day.
I wish more young people, and especially their parents, instilled in them this understanding that fads aren't real, fashion is transitory, it is not life. You are confused now but that won't last forever and if you do something terrible like hacking your breasts off there is every possibility in the world that the world will move on to the next crazy thing someday and you will be left with chest scars and bitterness that could swallow Atlantis.
Poise and dignity are something that happens to you daily, in every action that you take, and it is a long-term goal that pays dividends long into the future. Giving it up for the sake of being cool is a fools errand. Those cool kids won't be there forever, and what is cool changes every month now. I wish more parents and adults were having this conversation with kids. Hell...even Andy Warhol having this conversation with more kids. It is super needed.
She thinks “embarrassment” is the ultimate cringe”? The medical ramifications of “the vaccine” alone are going to cause worldwide pain.
Suck it up, Butterface…
"Right now, I think the biggest one will be abortion. I think future people will probably look at elective abortion like we look at slavery. "They ripped babies into pieces because people didn't want to deal with them?!""
HEAR!! HEAR!!! Freeman Hunt and all the other commenters after him who said this. THIS is the biggest one. It is on par with slavery and how we think of that today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MKQ0krjLpo
I’m pretty positive Lem may have linked this- it’s so important and I found it very interesting.
Darkhorse:0)
If you overreacted to the pandemic, and now regret the way you treated people who turned out to be right...don't sweat it.
You basically went along with throwing the Nuremberg Code out the window.
Nothing to be embarrassed or worried about. No regrets.
Trust me. You'll do it again. You were born with it. We are who we are.
Levi Starks said...I’ve decided (at least for me) that when the screaming is the loudest I must be the calmest.
"When the whole World is running towards the edge of a cliff, he who runs in the opposite direction seems to have lost his mind." - C.S. Lewis
This is the third or fourth article I have heard about bemoaning "How wrong we were" about the pandemic and the measures that were taken. Ace of Spades HQ points out that these articles are to establish the narrative that it was all in good faith, and that all should be forgiven.
In the end, nothing will be done to change the environment, the leaders will stay the same, no one shall be punished, and it will happen again.
How quickly the right wants to forget that at the national level they were in charge.
Nonsense. If the leftists have their way, no one will know any of this even happened. Seriously, don't any of these people read 1984??
That is the future they want. And so many people, especially women, seem to embrace it. they forget, or were never taught history, that shows that such people are the first ones liquidated after the totalitarians take power.
Again, doesn't anyone fucking read history anymore-or have they stopped teaching people how to think. It is pathetic, but then, it's the NYT, so I expect nothing less than a 6th grade level discussion of things.
They shouldn't be merely embarrassed; they should be publicly shamed
The Covid fallout in SF has led to the loss of thousands of tech jobs and all those juicy salaries. The impact on the local economy is going to be huge.
Embarrassed? Nope it was a test case for lockdowns. Anyone remember this? The right of the people peaceably to assemble .. . Yeah, the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The American public will rollover again because they are stooopid.
Richard Feynman wrote a great little book. The title was perfect: “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
+1. Strongly recommended reading.
Having said that, there's no forgiveness on my part for all the pandemic @ssh**es who shamed everyone for not obeying their ignorant and anti-science views on what to do.
+ 1. Howard the Fool heads that list.
When has the left ever felt shame over what it inflicts on the country? It should be feeling shame now for having inflicted the "War on Poverty" that resulted in two generations of dependency and broken families. It should be feeling shame for what has become of our public education system. Blue states should be feeling shame over confiscatory taxation that has resulted in millions of people migrating to red states.
But there is no shame. Just doubling down on the same old mistakes and saying "Next time we'll get it right."
"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
It's hard not to judge the people of the past by any standards but today's, which is the only standard most people know or can imagine.
But moral judgement is ancillary to studying and understanding the past anyway. The moralist will always find what xe is looking for, like any other ideologue.
[Excess] Fat is beautiful, healthy, and a comorbidity. However, "sharing is caring" when you're female, in love, and pregnant.
Levi Starks, I was a "normal" and didn't change my life at all. I practiced civil disobedience and saw the Covid mandates as simply control freak politicians as fascists.
Embarrassed? Joe Biden is a fucking embarrassment.
The dead are no longer capable of embarrassment or cringing. When you’re dead and gone, it’s not your problem any more.
As for the concept of “Future Me,” one of my favorite albums from recent years is ‘Future Me Hates Me,’ by The Beths, an indie band from New Zealand. Here’s a link to the full album on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nHNKOyNtg-U4Bd4xWGVqmLsuGb-9Znx2o
It makes people go a little crazy and become conspiracy theorists...
Sorry sweetheart. When it comes to COVID-19 in 2020 through 2022, the conspiracy theorists are batting like .1000 right now. There's that to consider.
Is this part of the left's changing the narrative? "Ooops, I'm so embarrassed. I freaked out over Covid and believed everything the government health officials said. That's why I wanted you to lose your job, be locked up, and vaccinated against your will. It could have happened to anyone. But, certainly you can understand and have no hard feelings, right?"
I believe this is just a continuing part of their "Covid amnesty" request. I'm a hard "NO".
Obligatory "Welcome to the party, pal."
What an odd experience to be scrolling through the comments and come across quote from one of my Journalism professors at Stanford (1990-91). Ted was a nice person, a good teacher, and a kind human being, but he was just incredibly wrong about this point. I vividly remember an argument in one of Ted's classes in which one of my colleagues yelled out "The slippery slope is a logical fallacy!" and I understand why people thought that to be the case, but as we see now, it turns out that, no, the slope is extremely slippery, and once you stop at least paying lip service to objectivity, the descent into just making crap up is rapid and, seemingly, irreversible. Halfway through my M.A. in Journalism, I decided I hated journalism (which made the last quarter and a half challenging, to say the least), but I'm actually grateful to Stanford: on their dime I got to discover how much I loathed the people who were big names in journalism and realize that there was no future for me in that profession. Much more importantly, I met my wife on the Stanford intramural ice-hockey club (obviously THE place to go if you want to meet a 5' tall, 100-lb woman from Jamaica), so I'm glad that the admissions committee wasted a scholarship on me (still not giving Stanford any $, though; they have enough).
They (the left with help from Trump) destroyed one of the greatest economies in history of the world and stole an election for good measure, so for lefties it worked out great...
Whatever we did was going to be wrong in retrospect.
Static Ping said...
We will all make embarrassing mistakes when put in situations with incomplete and/or incorrect information. It can't be helped. When COVID came, we didn't know how bad it was going to be, how quickly it would spread, if it could be contained at all, how to treat it, etc.
I'm going to assume you're mistaken and not actually lying. All the information anyone needed was provided by the Diamond Princess in February 2020. It wasn't as infectious as advertiesed, wans't as deadly as advertised, and didn't kill the otherwise healthy. And the USS Theodore Roosevelt debacle a month later verified it all. As far as treatment goes, there doctors successfully treating the dreaded covid early on- and hte US medical establishnment said don't do anything- because it was all unproven. Doctors weren't permitted to even try any treatments.
I am pretty sure we’ll be judged harshly for killing millions of unborn children and mutilating confused teens.
The American public will rollover again because they are stooopid.
Because we are comfortable.
Babies. Bennies for babies. Get your bennies for babies, NOW.
The Covid fallout in SF has led to the loss of thousands
The same thing happened with the rectally transmitted disease (RTD) AIDS. There was no pride or parades in San Fran' over a tri-decadel period.
Gain of Function Fauci Chi Com virus DESTROYED the world economy - but it worked out well for corrupt elite democrats.
“Those TikTok nurses should be embarrassed for sure.
Because when the pandemic finally reached their town and their floor they were busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
Exactly.
“what are we doing now that we are going to be embarrassed/ashamed of in the future? "
To quote a great American:
“That’s a problem for future Homer. I’m glad I’m not him!”
I’m pretty positive Lem may have linked this- it’s so important and I found it very interesting.
Darkhorse:0)
I had to stop watching. I got secondhand anxiety from hearing him mispronounce the doctor's name. I'd like to hear the interview, so I may try again later. Maybe after a couple glasses of wine.
Binge and purge - the SF treat.
I look forward to the Emily Litella “Never Mind” moment when we discover, through our own experience and science that the Anthropomorphic Catastrophe Climate Armageddon so confidently predicted never was and never will be realized, not because we stopped it, but because it was not actually a real threat. Sadly, I don’t expect to live that long.
Gospace, nope I am not lying. There was a lot of conflicting information early on, and I figured a lot of things were unknown. And I still think in those first few months that there was a lot of confusion and unknowns. Politicians were trying to make decisions on a topic they had no expertise and were relying on experts that were still trying to get their heads around the problem. In addition, I think certain individuals *coughFauciPoohcough* knew a lot more than they were letting on but was hiding that from the decision makers. That happens. Mistakes happen in those circumstances. Decisions from imperfect knowledge will be flawed.
My embarrassment is I figured that if anyone wouldn't lie to me, at least not for petty reasons, it would be the medical authorities during a pandemic. Foolish me. At this point my default position is if the government tells me anything, they are lying until proven otherwise.
A possible parallel: People near my age (54) may remember the absolute contempt we felt for every single thing that could be seen as being in any way "'70s" when we were in high school and college. Even things that were actually from the '60s (fake wood paneling, beaten-up mid-century modern interiors, crappy floor-to-ceiling pole-light fixtures, bean-bag chairs) got thought of as '70s and were utterly despised. It wasn't accidental that the loser villains of most low-budget 1980-1995 movies are men with characteristically '70s haircuts (comb-across, white-guy afro, male perm--and even today I feel a twinge of contempt for men with a mustache but no beard) and clothing (I still could not possibly imagine wearing a brown suit). The amazing thing was how the mass-rejection of everything '70s happened all at once: "Death before Disco" pops up out of nowhere and in a couple months an entire decade is despised and mocked for the next quarter century. That's what's going to happen to anything that reminds anyone young of the Pandemic Years, and it's a good thing, too.
Particularly embarrassing will be the memory of having fallen for ridiculous levels of hype about political, entertainment- and sports-figures who are just ok, maybe even decently talented, who in media minds have achieved apotheosis: Obama, Hilary Clinton, Beyonce, Linkin Park, Drake, Ed Sheeran, Payton Manning, LeBron James, Fauci, Neil de Grasse Tyson, [even though I really like him], Lizzo, Kanye West, Quentin Tarantino.
Even more embarrassing will be our having had a dementia-patient in the White House and everybody pretending he doesn't have pudding for brains. But I also think that, despite the 3.5 years of peace and prosperity, Trump is going to occupy a "what the hell were they thinking?" place in collective memory, particularly after Hilary dies and people conveniently forget what a terrible candidate (and person) she was.
(*Looking back, we '70s haters were right. The only good things that came out of that decade were the movies and the [non-disco] music).
This whole thread gives me a frisson embarrassant as I recall the many cheesy things I've wasted time and money on, like that "Beatles"-themed multi-media show I mentioned a while back. About 1975 or so.
In truth, the 70s were no better or worse than the other decades of my life so far, and if I'm ever nostalgic it's for my youth, not the times themselves.
When Neil Young made a fuss about leaving Spotify because they wouldn't censor Joe Rogin, I got out the CD and played Cinnamon Girl. The song means a lot to me and Neil didn't get a penny from me playing it, particularly because I think I paid just a penny for it at the BMG record club.
We’ll played, autothreads.
How quickly the right wants to forget that at the national level they were in charge.
How quickly the left wants to forget that the vaunted Science in which we were all constrained to "believe" under pain of social credit cutoff (and even suggestions that if we didn't "believe" we should be denied medical treatment) was all left, all the time. When the bit of the right that had any kind of microphone, in the person of Trump and a few others, tried to push back, remember how that went?
I think the Climate Change hysteria will be looked at like we see eugenics today. Eugenics was supported and promoted by all the best people--university professors, supreme court justices, popular politicians, writers and publishers. Laws were passed supporting forced sterilization of the unfit. Shutting down power plants and pipelines and deliberately throwing people out of work for climate change may be viewed with the same dismay as that some day.
Sheesh! Wasn't all that a wild ride? Ha ha ha ha..oh..
https://nursefreedomnetwork.substack.com/p/our-saving-grace?r=156x0i&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR2J0eduCdj5DSnyoKIYg9_Mfqj9OkVk1YSsL8_OCdGf-sBLNPLglVwMWo4
"How quickly the right wants to forget that at the national level they were in charge."
Trump certainly bears a lot of the blame for February 2020 until mid April 2020, but after that he had it right, and faced nothing but resistance from the leftists in his own government and all the blue state governors and legislatures. It was the Republican lead states that actually prevented us from an even worse calamity, and people like you, Left Bank, castigated them mercilessly. So, go fuck yourself- no one is takes you seriously any longer- you are just another one of the idiots that got is catastrophically wrong.
Here is a reply to the "Oh, no one could have gotten this right in a panic."
I look forward to the Emily Litella “Never Mind” moment when we discover, through our own experience and science that the Anthropomorphic Catastrophe Climate Armageddon so confidently predicted never was and never will be realized, not because we stopped it, but because it was not actually a real threat. Sadly, I don’t expect to live that long.
It's never going to happen. Seriously. I can show you articles from the early twentieth century predicting the Earth drastically warming or the Earth drastically cooling. It's where the guys who used to run around predicting biblical Armageddon is just around the corner went to.
ndspinelli said...
"Levi Starks, I was a "normal" and didn't change my life at all. I practiced civil disobedience and saw the Covid mandates as simply control freak politicians as fascists."
Me too.
And yet the Covidians persist. I just learned that a neighbor, friendly acquaintance and former colleague (attorney married to attorney) had thrown a wedding for their daughter (attorney) three months ago. Curious to see pictures of the happy couple, I found their public wedding site and was shocked and sickened to see the following demand:
Guests must be fully vaccinated. Negative Covid tests will not be accepted.
WTH?? On top of being vicious and rude, it's backwards even for a Covidian. If they truly cared about not spreading The Crud, they would ask FOR negative tests over a vax card, because absolutely everyone is vulnerable to transmitting this infection; vax status makes NO difference.
Rigel,
Except it DOES matter.
The "fully vaccinated" enjoy that pesky negative efficacy.
And sadly, a jabbed couple has increased failed pregnancies or MRNA contaminated breast milk. Natural birth might be a bit of a strain on the heart too.
But hey, I'm sure it will be ok....
"On top of being vicious and rude, it's backwards even for a Covidian." There is NO logic involved beyond in-group/out-group and the vaccine is a loyalty-marker. Had the pleasant experience of being lectured on how we didn't understand "the science" by a relative. Between my wife and I we have 22 combined years of college and grad school, 7 higher ed degrees (2 B.A., 3 M.A., 2 Ph.D.) in both engineering and humanities from the most, a shelf full of authored books, patents, 25 years of professoring and 25 years of advanced defense industry research. Said relative has an Associates from a Community College. But "you can't just go off and do your own research," as if reading published scientific papers is an esoteric skill. Even better, when we did the math and explained how, even if an N95 mask was worn perfectly (which no one can do for more than 40 mins at a time, if they can do at all), the 5% of the virus particles that are acknowledged to get through (setting aside that the quality control on Chinese manufactured PPE was ridiculously bad) in 15 minutes were enough to infect every person in a 20'x20' room 100 times over, we were told "You can't just calculate those things yourself. These things are done by PROFESSIONALS!" "You've been brainwashed by Fox News!" (we never watch ANY TV news). So the relative was more ready to believe a talking head on TV because that person claimed to be relaying "truth" from some federal bureaucracy (membership in which is hardly limited to the "best and the brightest" and is in fact more made up of "people who were too unproductive and socially maladjusted to get get private sector jobs OR university appointments) than THEIR OWN RELATIVES with DECADES of both higher education and professional experience. I had a colleague get red in the face about how forcing everyone to get the vaccine made HIM safer but completely unable to explain how that possibly could be when the vaccine did not protect against infection or transmission. This thing is/was a cult.
"If they truly cared about not spreading The Crud..."
It's not about that. It's about control.
Non-sterilizing shots with therapeutic effect in what lies in plain sight.
Masks of debris accumulator, viral collector, and petri dish effect.
Sequester in darkness with present and progressive collateral damage.
Economic choice and corruption through single/central/monopolistic democratic dictation.
Guests must be fully vaccinated.
Immunity not required. Nice.
And to add to what RigelDog, n.n., and others have said, the vaccinated are the only asymptomatic spreaders of the dreaded covid. As I said before in this forum, I finally got it from a twice vaccinated 40 year younger fellow Scout leader on his second go round with it. With no symptoms until the next day. And our symptoms followed the exact same course, though he had them one day longer.
Makes me wonder if he would have also tested negative that evening.
So proof of vaccination is absolutely useless for stopping transmission of the dreaded covid.
Static,
"Politicians were trying to make decisions on a topic they had no expertise and were relying on experts that were still trying to get their heads around the problem"
Complete and utter nonsense! The solution called "Let's just do what we did last time a world ending pandemic was predicted" (i.e. pretty much nothing) wasn't just available, but in the living memory of most everyone involved in the implementation of the insane tyranny.
How quickly the right wants to forget that at the national level they were in charge.
Of what? Not the House. Not the Senate. Not the bureaucracy.
Just what were we in 'charge' of?
"The solution called "Let's just do what we did last time a world ending pandemic was predicted" (i.e. pretty much nothing) wasn't just available, but in the living memory of most everyone involved in the implementation of the insane tyranny."
I'm not sure which pandemic you may be referring to, but in the case of the 1918 Flu Pandemic doing "pretty much nothing" was not the solution they pursued. What was done was similar to what was done in response to COVID.
As for "insane tyranny," if you think that of the measures taken in the last few years to try to curb spread of COVID, you simply have no clue what tyranny is.
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