Day 1005: Amnestesia

The response to Emily Oster's recent plea in The Atlantic for a COVID-craziness amnesty went over surprisingly poorly. She got ratioed on Twitter for her forgive-and-forget stance, and all the usual suspects blogged their implacable opposition to letting anyone off the hook for criminal COVID insanity.

Mathew Crawford recaps some of the posts qua Apology Games (the lack of an apology being the first thing that comes up in criticism's of Oster's amnestesia), notably Eugyppius' salty take and Vinay Prasad's "narcissistic fence-sitting". Eugyppius was actually harsher than Crawford lets on:

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

But of course the bad cat has the saltiest take:

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise for so doing.

otherwise, you're just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed.

ignorance of the law is [no] excuse. neither is ignorance of ethics or epidemiology.

P.S. Not to be outdone, Eugyppius goes another round against Emily Oster and her fellow "Head Girls":

One of the reasons things like lockdowns and mass vaccination frenzies have become possible in the first place, is the uniformity of outlook and opinion among the governing elite. When everybody, from university professors to the minister president of Bavaria to municipal police administrators, believes that with enough social distancing we can eradicate SARS-2, and that the unvaccinated are responsible for prolonging the pandemic, the result is a powerful if erratic and ever-shifting social tyranny. Social media technologies have been particularly noxious for the consensus formation of the Head Girls, widening the range of issues on which they have functionally identical opinions and enforcing conformity more thoroughly than was ever before possible. And should one of their runaway preference cascades go off the rails and destroy society, they’ll rapidly reunite around the new consensus position, that nobody could’ve known any better and all the worst offenders—especially their friends and colleagues—acted in good faith with the knowledge that was available at the time.

P.P.S. Cartoonist Bob Moran also has something to say: