With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
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.
I mean I'm not pro-vaccine mandate, although I did get vaccinated ASAP. I was also pro-lockdown initially but displeased with the length and way they are implemented.
The issue is that the people who are still talking about this years later did not learn any lessons (both sides) and in the case of the skeptics, miss how bad it was.
I'm really not sure why you responded to me in the first place, then. I think you actually have views pretty close to my own, and I also think that you're numerate enough to agree that it was in no way an existential threat. So yeah, uh, why respond to a comment that is just pointing out that it was absolutely not an existential threat?
Eh it's almost always tied together when it comes up, if you feel like it isn't for you, carry on.
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