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The bad faith deflections from lockdown supporters around Sweden are really difficult to take given the seriousness of the stakes.
Bring up Sweden and you'll get "yeah but their deaths are so much higher than their neighbors". Like OK, that's something to talk about, but the point is, if the stronger claims made for lockdown were true Sweden's first wave should still be happening!
The point is given what demonstrably empirically happened in Sweden - that Sweden's curve bent and fell much as everyone else's - clearly lockdowns are not the determinant of whether epidemic curves bend or not. More modest claims for lockdown could of course still be true.
It's an important point because both the public debate and the course of events proceeds as if the strongest claims about lockdowns were true when they clearly aren't, because Sweden (and others) provide glaring undeniable evidence that epidemic courses do not turn on lockdowns.
But any time you make that point, lockdowners just shift to this "look at the other Nordics" point //and then go back to making arguments as if lockdowns were a big red STOP EPIDEMIC button governments can press whenever they want//
I spent years doing debate as a competitive bloodsport for middle-class aspirants at university, I know how to throw out a cheap line to neutralize your opponents' strong points in a context where you're only pretending to care about the actual issue you're batting about for fun
This I fundamentally don't get tho because this is real life, all of us are suffering, and these are often people of good faith (or at least who I'm used to seeing as such). What's the motivation here? What possible reason could there be to treat this discussion like a game??
Is it really just about the left beating "the right", even if the things they're saying are true? Is it just about looking like a certain kind of person (virtuous, clued-in, pro-science, whatever) on the internet? What's going on? Why do people behave this way?
I get that there's big stakes and people are scared of doing the wrong thing. But surely the right thing is not going to be found by divvying up the facts between political tribes and battling it out as partisans of one half of the facts against the other? I don't get it.
