I’ve noticed some people enjoy listening to audio readings of posts. Experimentally I have uploaded an audio reading of this post to Odysee. Maybe that habit will become something more, maybe not, I’m just experimenting. It is only an audio reading of what you’ll find below, so don’t click over expecting something more elaborate! Your comments on the experiment are welcome.
On point 2: over the past 19 months the Amish and the ultra-orthodox Jews in Brooklyn have, from what I've seen, been quite successful at keeping themselves apart from the lockdown authorities and continuing to life pretty much as they were in past years. I don't know what their stances on the vaccine requirements are.
Also, given the trend of an exodus from big cities and their lockdowns, I could've expected to read an account of people forming "Covid communes" in, say, rural Texas or Kentucky, where they can form a separate community, as the Amish have. But I haven't seen one.
One other thought: I suppose it's mostly an accident rather than the product of some brilliant 10-dimensional chess strategy, but the framing of the COVID debate has been uniquely well-suited to splitting elements of the cultural right, already prone to fissiparous tendencies due to the Protestant-Catholic divide. Evangelical Protestants have historically been the footsoldiers of the movement, with Catholic academics providing their intellectual heft. But a sizable fraction of Catholics (basically "Team Orban": Vermeule, Ahmari, Deneen, Dreher, Gray Connolly) have been inclined to grant enormous deference to the state on public health issues, regarding them as an ideal vessel for rallying support for a broader postliberal project. Peeling off these voices (or at least moderating them, in Deneen's case) has blunted the eloquence of resistance to vaccine mandates, by downgrading such stances into a less reputable form of bumptious populism.
With respect to the use of audio recordings, I think there's an important sense in which they fight back against the ghettoization of dissident voices by letting non-mainstream ideas sound educated and humane instead of being fringe-y samizdat. This has been a deliberate strategy in the last few years, as an alternative to complete censorship, where pushback against the mainstream narrative has been moved to locations where it's harder to find and requires more effort than the mainstream news narrative. The ghetto is becoming overpopulated with a complicated mix of "anyone challenging orthodoxy on a set of sacralized issues" (public health, and a bunch of other things you can instantly thing of with little effort!) and "actually crazy people who think that vaccines are full of microchips". This makes it really hard to set up a media counterinsurgency that is well fact-checked and tonally similar to high-status sources (PBS, NPR, the BBC, NYC/WaPo, etc) but challenges them on substance.
One side effect of this is that nonstandard ideas are represented by poor quality dialectic -- which is quite unlike the situation 50 years ago, when outsider voices were well-represented among highly-educated academics. Today, the choice feels like "listen to NPR say all the predictable stuff NPR is going to say, but in a pleasant and conversational tone that won't embarrass you if someone walks in", or "listen to some second-tier podcaster who sounds like he's trying to mimic Limbaugh or Tucker". There's a certain type of person (my wife! my mother! all my siblings! most of my peers in academia!) who will always pick the first option on the basis of tone, and slowly become catechized by the content even if they didn't originally agree with it.
For someone who is politically trad-conservative but also a college professor with a doctorate in physics (as some of us tend to be!), this is quite frustrating. "I'd love to engage with your ideas, but can you please find me a source who sounds polite, intelligent, and sane?" is an increasingly vexing challenge when someone poses it to me, and with good production values you definitely have a shot at being on a short list of recommendable sources.
Oh, and with respect to the French-vs-Ahmari debate: I don't see anything inconsistent with observing both that "liberalism has failed and for the moment we need to be able to fight back on equal terms against an illiberal society" and "it sure would be better if liberalism weren't failing in the first place, and we should nonetheless hold it up as an ideal". That's the nature of every war; praise peace as a virtue, but don't put down your guns until it's an option on the table.
On point 2: over the past 19 months the Amish and the ultra-orthodox Jews in Brooklyn have, from what I've seen, been quite successful at keeping themselves apart from the lockdown authorities and continuing to life pretty much as they were in past years. I don't know what their stances on the vaccine requirements are.
Also, given the trend of an exodus from big cities and their lockdowns, I could've expected to read an account of people forming "Covid communes" in, say, rural Texas or Kentucky, where they can form a separate community, as the Amish have. But I haven't seen one.
One other thought: I suppose it's mostly an accident rather than the product of some brilliant 10-dimensional chess strategy, but the framing of the COVID debate has been uniquely well-suited to splitting elements of the cultural right, already prone to fissiparous tendencies due to the Protestant-Catholic divide. Evangelical Protestants have historically been the footsoldiers of the movement, with Catholic academics providing their intellectual heft. But a sizable fraction of Catholics (basically "Team Orban": Vermeule, Ahmari, Deneen, Dreher, Gray Connolly) have been inclined to grant enormous deference to the state on public health issues, regarding them as an ideal vessel for rallying support for a broader postliberal project. Peeling off these voices (or at least moderating them, in Deneen's case) has blunted the eloquence of resistance to vaccine mandates, by downgrading such stances into a less reputable form of bumptious populism.
With respect to the use of audio recordings, I think there's an important sense in which they fight back against the ghettoization of dissident voices by letting non-mainstream ideas sound educated and humane instead of being fringe-y samizdat. This has been a deliberate strategy in the last few years, as an alternative to complete censorship, where pushback against the mainstream narrative has been moved to locations where it's harder to find and requires more effort than the mainstream news narrative. The ghetto is becoming overpopulated with a complicated mix of "anyone challenging orthodoxy on a set of sacralized issues" (public health, and a bunch of other things you can instantly thing of with little effort!) and "actually crazy people who think that vaccines are full of microchips". This makes it really hard to set up a media counterinsurgency that is well fact-checked and tonally similar to high-status sources (PBS, NPR, the BBC, NYC/WaPo, etc) but challenges them on substance.
One side effect of this is that nonstandard ideas are represented by poor quality dialectic -- which is quite unlike the situation 50 years ago, when outsider voices were well-represented among highly-educated academics. Today, the choice feels like "listen to NPR say all the predictable stuff NPR is going to say, but in a pleasant and conversational tone that won't embarrass you if someone walks in", or "listen to some second-tier podcaster who sounds like he's trying to mimic Limbaugh or Tucker". There's a certain type of person (my wife! my mother! all my siblings! most of my peers in academia!) who will always pick the first option on the basis of tone, and slowly become catechized by the content even if they didn't originally agree with it.
For someone who is politically trad-conservative but also a college professor with a doctorate in physics (as some of us tend to be!), this is quite frustrating. "I'd love to engage with your ideas, but can you please find me a source who sounds polite, intelligent, and sane?" is an increasingly vexing challenge when someone poses it to me, and with good production values you definitely have a shot at being on a short list of recommendable sources.
Oh, and with respect to the French-vs-Ahmari debate: I don't see anything inconsistent with observing both that "liberalism has failed and for the moment we need to be able to fight back on equal terms against an illiberal society" and "it sure would be better if liberalism weren't failing in the first place, and we should nonetheless hold it up as an ideal". That's the nature of every war; praise peace as a virtue, but don't put down your guns until it's an option on the table.