Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
1yr ago
I was hoping the US would adopt a mask culture similar to what Japan has, where wearing a mask is common for people that have the sniffles but need to go out and get groceries, and its not weird to put a mask on when you are on the train with a bunch of gross randos.
This is still performative masking, it's just one-step higher up on the political posturing scale. In the US, you wear a mask to signal that you care in a specifically blue-tribe way. In Japan, you wear a mask to signal that you care (or, sometimes, to disguise your face). Neither actually does any caring, of course, as the solution to not spreading respiratory diseases to others is to stay at home and eat chicken soup or whatever your regional equivalent of this is.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
You'd need to look at a country that never saw adoption of masks to confirm that masks were the culprit. Sweden is basically the only country I can think of to avoid mass masking, either cultural or legally enforced. They seem to also report no influenza season: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publikationer-och-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-season-2020-2021/?pub=99545
Tophattingson
1yr ago
This just amplifies the important of archiving to prevent intelligentsia memory-holing their past statements. At the very least they should publicly rebuke their past selves, not merely pretend they disagreed all along.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
It's not merely rankest hypocrisy. It's also not a return to normal. Normal is when people who impose e.g. false imprisonment get dragged through the courts and then sentenced for their crimes. Certainly I can't imagine many people in 2019 responding to "what should be done to a leader who -list of restrictions-" with anything less than a few court cases.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
If I thought it was the case that this was the only way to return to the pre-2020 consensus that imprisoning the entire population for no reason was unthinkable, then I'd support foreign invasion and/or violent revolution. However, I do not.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
You don't even really explain what your position is (No lockdowns whatsoever? Lesser lockdowns? Lockdowns until 3 weeks after vaccines were available to all and not a day longer? Lockdowns implemented voluntarily by non-governmental organizations but not any by the government? Government campaigns against social distancing so it doesn't drag on due to voluntary behavior? Better-targeted lockdowns that don't do useless things like restrict borders after it is already spreading domestically?) let alone explain why you have that position.
Why do they have to have a separate position and explain it? If there was a political trend advocating for hitting the Earth with an asteroid, would you demand that critics of asteroid billiards provide an alternative policy beyond just not doing that? Sometimes, simply saying "don't do that" needs no further elaboration. See also, politician's syllogism.
"Mass Formation Psychosis" just seems like a buzzword.
There's definitely something self-sustaining to lockdownism that makes it uniquely powerful as a variant of totalitarianism. Most ideologies have some sort of engine that, whether by design or by accident, sustains them, by bringing in new people and stopping them from leaving. Dawkins would have described it as a meme by his original intent: a self-replicating bit of culture, some of which are far better at self-replicating than others and of which lockdownism might just be the best ever at spreading.
But I don't think there's anything spooky like "Psychosis" explaining this. I think it's rather simple, actually. The core tenants of lockdownism are self-sustaining. That is to say, if you actually believe in these restrictions and carry them out, then the process of doing this will sustain your own belief in lockdowns:
They control behaviour by robbing people of everyday life. They destroy bonds of friends, family and work, and replace these bonds with bonds to distant figures like Fauci. They make people financially reliant on leadership (i.e the government) for survival. They isolate people from dissenting information by keeping people locked up in their houses, unable to hear or even see those who disagree - all outside sources are dismissed as not merely wrong, but actively dangerous. Any contact with people who don't agree with lockdowns is frowned upon above and beyond that of contact in general - they disagree, therefore they are more likely to be infected, and are more likely to kill you. Through masking, your empathy towards others is decreased. At a broader scale, political pluralism and serious disagreement are de facto outlawed via a combination of bans on public meetings and censorship of alternatives to public meetings...
The weakness is in the long-term. Once everyone is entrenched in this system, the economic wellbeing of society inevitably tanks to the point where it becomes unsustainable. These systems of control don't function once you have rolling blackouts knocking out information control infrastructure, seized up supply networks blocking deliveries, and people emerge from their isolation in desperate search fulfilling basic needs. They also don't function once people notice that the prophesies are failing, and the sinners aren't all dead - Bill down the road is one of those disgusting anti-vaxxers, and you've not spoken to him in months, but somehow his car keeps coming and going. In this regard, vaccine mandates could be seen as a way to resolve this discomfort - a way to make manifest in the real world the sufferings that are meant to befall the prophesized enemies, after they fail to emerge as a result of their sins.
It really shares quite a lot in common with the strategies that cults use to manipulate members. It's just that in this case, the policy prescription of lockdowns is inherently manipulative, rather than (or alongside) being intentionally so. Unlike a cult, it never replaces comradery with the outside world with comradery with the cult itself, instead just leaving a miserable void. Perhaps it's long-term instability is similar to Nazism and Communism, rather than religious cults - it feels good while you're killing Jews/Kulaks/whatever, but inevitably the reality that you can't sustain a society based on killing imaginary enemies sets in.
I don't know if this is a steelman of Mass Formation Psychosis, however. Maybe this is what those people are really getting at, beneath the layers of buzzwords.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
As already said below, Covid deaths are, by the numbers, no bigger a deal than a number of other things that don't cause giant public freakouts. The distinction isn't death numbers. We got this for covid and not heart disease, plausibly, because there's no (or at least no easy) way to turn avoiding heart disease into an all-consuming ideology sustained through isolation, decimation of support structures, and hatred of dissenters. If anything, the opposite would happen. No-heart-disease-mania would manifest in being physically active and psychologically healthy, quite unlike the self-destructive behaviours encouraged by lockdownism. It would present plenty of encounters with dissenters who you are already primed to at least heed, telling you that maybe spending your entire life living like a hyper fitness obsessed monk to extend your lifespan by a few weeks isn't a good trade-off.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
The Canadian government's actions against political dissidents over the last two years leave it a non-democracy regardless of election procedures. You can't have free, fair elections if huge swaths of political opinion are the target of state violence. After the use of the emergencies act against people protesting vaccine mandates, how certain can we be that Trudeau won't engage in similar attacks on his other political opponents when expedient?
There are no safeguards and yet they do OK.
Well, we did okay until the Coronavirus Act 2020 created rule by decree - executive was able to create new laws without input from parliament.
Believe it or not, this is how the Framers originally saw Presidential elections going most of the time, with the EC failing to find a majority and the election being forced to the House, except when a 'man of national renown' (read, at the time of the Philadelphia Convention: Washington) had the charisma, fame, and respect to garner an outright EC majority.
And 1824 is the only time this actually happened, right?
Tophattingson
1yr ago
People's thinking about genocide generally starts and ends with "goodies in charge means no genocide, baddies in charge means genocide". I think the topic of the state infrastructure required to enable genocide will go over their heads.
You're right about lockdown-related state infrastructure also being indicative of what countries could carry out genocide. The infrastructure Canada used to carry out a political and social purge of unvaccinated people could trivially be pointed at ethnic minorities and used for genocide too. And there's certainly something in how China's covid surveillance infrastructure and Uighur surveillance infrastructure are the same infrastructure. But again, I think "If you can do lockdowns, you can also do genocide" is likely to go over people's heads (or, in Canada, mark you as one of the anti-vaxxers to be purged). OP is a teacher at a school, having to impress other teachers at that school, in a society that for the past two years has marked people who dissent on these matters as persona non grata. They'd be more likely to survive just outright ignoring the day than by trying to point out the connections between lockdowns and the oppression of ethnic groups, even if it's likely relevant to why Nunavut had the least stringent vaccine mandate policies.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
To give an opposite option: If you really want to go down in flames, find a charity relating to the church burnings that happened in 2021 (there's gotta be one, either generally linked to churches that were burned or specifically trying to repair them). Put that on your shirt.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Left-leaning spaces do not equally apply slur, the definition of slur is set in a way that's favourable to left-leaning etc etc.
Sorry, it's just a bit rich to hear that left-leaning spaces are intrinsically nicer after the last three years of people in hobby spaces treating me as subhuman, whether for disagreeing with lockdowns or for not taking whatever injections my government demands of me. Many of these supposedly left-leaning hobbyist spaces are casually, pervasively hateful in a way that only doesn't get recognised as hate because hate gets defined in whatever way is most useful to them at the time. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in wanting someone locked down. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in demanding that unvaccinated people be stabbed by needles. (this is why I am relatively supportive towards anti-lockdown people who e.g. shout abuse and threats at legislators - don't dish out what you can't take) And to bring the further-left into this as well, there is real, serious hate in demanding that others live under socialist or communist regimes. Supporting the Soviet Union is as racist towards Ukrainians as supporting the Nazis is towards Jews. It's so pervasive that even people on my side often recognise these things as wrong yet completely overlook the whole hatred angle of it!
Tophattingson
1yr ago
In countries without Euthanasia, people being denied access to medical treatment leads to dissent, disagreement and debate over policy, and potentially, the policy being changed in future. Seemingly, in countries with Euthanasia, it (at least in this example) leads to suicides. Not all pressure valves are good. Euthanasia permitting greater misrule as angry people instead become dead people is a plausible problem.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
I think our current governments would euthanise a lot more than just the elderly if they could.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Legal suicide indeed isn't the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia.
I see the combination of government being strong enough to engage in systematic torture of the population, as evidenced by lockdowns, and also offering euthanasia to be a uniquely dangerous combination of circumstances. At it's most extreme, consider the practice of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union. Dissidents were classed as mentally ill, with the nonsense-diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". This didn't progress to outright euthanasia as e.g the Nazis did, but if there's no pre-existing barriers to euthanasia, like there is now in places like Canada, it's very easy to see that progression. All this hypothetical government need do to kill a bunch of dissidents is make their lives unliveable with restrictions (such as targeting the unvaccinated with vaccine mandates) cause them severe unhappiness via the circumstances, misdiagnose that as depression rather than the normal affect towards the circumstances, and off them.
This is personal, too. My very vehement disagreement with lockdowns lead some now-former family members (as in, I distanced myself from them in response to this) to falsely accuse me of mental illness because I refused to provide information to a track and trace scheme. I see a concerningly short path from the government legalizing euthanasia to them trying to use it to find some reason to murder people like me.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...
Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?
The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.
Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
What more could I ask for? In the UK, the maximum penalty for falsely imprisoning someone is 20 years. The government has, collectively, ~210,000,000 counts of false imprisonment to answer for. So the most I could ask for is Boris being imprisoned approximately until the sun explodes.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
It's only in the actual advent of a pandemic that the safetyists came out of the woodwork and demanded the opposite prescription.
Then we should be able to find this woodwork that they came out of. I've looked for it before. It ain't there. There's no segment of the public health community that, prior to 2020, thought imprisoning the entire population of a country in their own homes in the long-term was a suitable response to anything.
Are you taxing land, or are you taxing land value? If it's the latter, you can definitely lower the production of land value. I could make my house look super-ugly, put bars over the windows and cover the lawns in trash to reduce it's valuation. If you think you can decouple this as an improvement distinct from the value of the land itself... good luck.
People will deliberately uglify their homes to avoid taxes. The UK has experience with this, back when we had a window tax. Intended to be a simple way to assess property taxes - larger houses have more windows, windows can be counted from the outside, can't cheat the number of windows you have. People responded by bricking up their windows and living in darkness instead of paying the tax.
When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.
There's something fascinating about this video, which seems to be a pattern that I've noticed in the ultra-online US left, where for all the admonishment they'll do of their own side, whenever they speak about anyone right-wing, they speak as if they are so far beneath them that even when right-wingers agree with them they are wrong. I'm not really sure how to phrase it, but it's like... they treat even the centre-right, who in theory should agree with them on far more than the far-left, as axiomatically wrong? As if their perpetual wrongness is just an inherent part of the universe. Almost this meme. And they end up doing the rhetorical equivalent of contortionist backflips to agree with them while pretending to disagree with them.
It's just a very strange attitude to have if you're actively trying to discuss flaws within your own side. Shouldn't you at least give credence to the possibility that those on the other side of the aisle might be right, even if not specifically so in this instance? Seeing a discussion that acknowledges uncertainty in their own views, while simultaneously absolute certainty on others, is weird.
Edit: The highlight here is when they address that conservatives calling out insane views on Twitter, which initially they attributed to being niche nobodies, but now acknowledge as actually becoming mainstream views. Then they just... Blitz past it without acknowledging that they were wrong, and those filthy rightoids were right. Or the Covington and Rittenhouse stuff - shouldn't conservatives get credit for calling it right?
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Why would it benefit Russia to accidentally blow up Boris Johnson? Why would the Poles hate Russia less if Duda gets got?
At least in my case, that would improve my opinion of Russia.
It's quite likely we'll get some actual information on it from one of the relevant legal cases at some point.
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