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Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

>I liked your point about tribalism up until you said one tribe is rational and the other not. The distribution of rational behavior does not change much tribe to tribe, it's the values that change. As soon as you say one tribe is more rational than another you're just feeding into more tribalism by insulting a whole group's intelligence.

That was largely the case until these most recent electoral cycle, where the Great Crank Realignment, driven by the COVID response, pushed conspiracy theorists, health and wellness grifters, supplement hawkers, and many others to the right.

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Umm, the COVID response itself was just as much a religion as it was science. There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces. There were requirements for people whose job was to sit in a truck's cab by themselves all day to vaccinate or lose said job. There were unnecessarily draconian shutdowns. There was uncontrolled and unaudited spending on saving nonexistent businesses and buying enough vaccines for several more years of COVID (but with expiry dates within a year).

If the harsh response to COVID had been necessary, the places that didn't do it should have died out. They did not. You simply don't hear about the Great Depopulation of Africa.

And yet you will read the above, label me a crank, and downvote this. Meaning that you are just as tribal as the people you look down upon.

> There were people walking nature trails with nobody around with their masks securely on their faces.

Rogan got really worried about masks and health and at the same time was for instance having a guy on who does underwater weight lifting for training NBA players and gave him the highest praise and started advertising his tumeric coffee. Were masks during that kind of activity really harmful to people but underwater weight lifting and extreme in-sauna exercize good?

If California had held their restrictions a month or two longer until the vaccine they would have had many less deaths.

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