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naraburns  nihil supernum  9d ago (text post)   26700 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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can't say how I'd react when put into a similar position

Would you have threatened the livelihood of 100,000,000 citizens unless they submitted to an unconstitutional mandate that abrogated their right to bodily autonomy? Even after massive concerns from multiple constitutional scholars?

If so, could you elaborate on that a little?

We're working with contrafactuals, but if I truly believed that the virus was an existential threat in the way it was sold as, I truly wouldn't know. For better or for worse, I'd see myself as responsible for the people who died. Like I said, I don't know what I'd do, but I can't imagine that it was a simple or easy choice.

Of course, this is all assuming that politicians actually want what's best for the country and are not a cabal of soul-sucking freaks.

I appreciate you taking the time to expand on your reasoning. Thank you.

existential threat

I mean, we had a pretty good idea what the IFR was by that point, so if someone bought this, I think it could only really come down to innumeracy.

A relatively small number of deaths can easily cause massive economic problems and overwhelm hospitals leading to all sorts of problems including...you guessed it, more deaths.

The problem wasn't the lockdowns. They were sensible. The problem was the way they were implemented and not having a reasonable offramp.

A relatively small number of deaths can easily cause massive economic problems and overwhelm hospitals leading to all sorts of problems including...you guessed it, more deaths.

If every hospital we have were suddenly carpet bombed tomorrow, would there be some increased follow-on deaths? Absolutely. Would it be an existential threat?! Please.

FYI, this subthread (from birb_cromble) seems to be referring to vaccine mandates rather than lockdowns.

I'm not saying it was truly an existential threat, but it was way worse than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge. What those numbers translate to practically is pretty bad. It's hard to notice if you were locked up though, which many were...so they didn't.

Well, the question is whether the President is in a position to know that wasn't an existential threat. If you're the President and ignorant people think it's an existential threat, but you know that it's not an existential threat, you help them understand that it's not an existential threat. And then we move to the next question of whether you would have "threatened the livelihood of 100,000,000 citizens unless they submitted to an unconstitutional mandate that abrogated their right to bodily autonomy? Even after massive concerns from multiple constitutional scholars?"

"Sufficiently damaging to the economy, American lives, and functioning of the government" isn't quite the same as "existential threat" and still justifies much of what happened.

I mean, we could relitigate it, again. Suffice to say, I think it very plausibly justifies some version of the lockdowns that happened in 2020 (plausibly not all; it's hard to really go back mentally, put ourselves in those shoes again, and pin things down), but almost certainly does not justify all of the vaccine mandates that happened (or attempted to happen) in 2021. Thankfully, the Supreme Court agreed that the most egregious one didn't pass muster and several others petered out. Especially because after they failed, the sky did not fall, because it was absolutely nowhere near an existential risk. I don't think you understand how gigantic the gap is between "existential risk", what actually happened, or even your characterization of what the biggest fears were.

Do you think that "Sufficiently damaging to the economy, American lives, and functioning of the government" should have at least justified pushing the FDA further out of the way, streamlining the process more, enabling human challenge trials, and just letting people buy/sell the vaccine based on their personalized needs and the price mechanism? It seems to me that such a path would have been vastly more efficient at addressing your concerns, and it could have been done pretty early in 2020, not in 2021 when the cows were completely and totally out of the barn.

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