This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Home imprisonment often comes with reasons you are allowed to leave your home. Even prisoners placed in prisons get home leave from prisons, for instance, and nobody would deny that they're not imprisoned. The reason the definition of imprisonment needs to be so broad is because otherwise it allows situations where pseudo-imprisonments can't be challenged by their victims.
To put it another way, I know a relative who was sectioned (is it called that in the US) for two weeks and then recovered and was released. During their sectioning, they actually had more liberties than they did under lockdowns, as they were permitted to go anywhere for two hours a day for any reason, every day. Not to mention access to legal protections if there was reason to believe that the sectioning was done fraudulently.
Nazi Germany justified genocide on the grounds of curtailing personal liberties in an emergency. (Edit: This is not the actual reason but it's the steelman they could make. Nazi Germany didn't recognise personal liberties as a thing at all. Similarly, lockdownist regimes don't actually believe they're "curtailing personal liberties in an emergency" because they don't recognise personal liberties as a thing either. You don't see relevant leaders regretfully apologising for their crimes against human rights just before they go on to commit them, they just go unacknowledged or denied. Further, those who criticize lockdowns for being breaches of human rights do not get the response that they are a regretful breach of human rights but something something utilitarian priorities. Rather, they get called far-right extremists or conspiracy theorists, suggesting lockdownist leaders at least publicly deny that any loss of personal liberties happened at all)
Prior to 2020 there was a quasi-universal moral consensus against false imprisonment. That's why it's in the universal declaration of human rights. It's why there's objections to concentration camps. Or at least there were, until places like Australia started opening them up. Countries have been condemned, sanctioned, isolated etc for far, far less than what many places did in 2020.
Lockdowns do not reduce freedom in the name of safety because they both don't increase safety from covid and also massively increase danger from the government. I am against false imprisonment in particular. The response was empirically ineffective given that countries that declined to do lockdowns saw no ill effect from doing so. I am against all covid-related travel restrictions because governments clearly cannot be trusted with an inch lest they take a mile.
Does this hypothetical serve a purpose? It's like asking if you'd be against the holocaust if Nazi ideology was proven to work. A world in which Nazi ideology was correct does not resemble our own in any way. For a start, there's no hypothetical way for a lockdown to pass a cost-benefit analysis because the maximum benefit is so small compared to the minimum cost. Even if our lockdowns as actually carried out worked and prevented, say... 0.6% of the population dying, the amount of time people were placed under lockdown itself undoes that through QALY losses.
Certainly not 'apologise for their crimes' because obviously an apology for a 'crime' would imply they are wrong anyway, but politicians absolutely constantly stressed that these decisions were not being taken lightly and were only demanded by truly extraordinary circumstances.
Perhaps the most important thing though is that they subjected themselves to the same measures (partygate etc. notwithstanding) - how many high-ranking Nazis subjected themselves to the concentration camps?
Pointing out that politicians obeyed lockdowns, except of course when they didn't, is the equivalent of damning with faint praise. "Disproving with faint proof"?
Partygate was mostly bad because Boris lied to the House not because the infringements were all that bad. He got the fine in the end for a very mild offence indeed, one that I suspect most people were guilty of at some point during the pandemic. It's still unacceptable, but it hardly undermines the point that, in general, they too were subject to the rules.
The political culture that is the UK took intentional violations of the lockdown by pro-lockdown politicians and officials very seriously indeed. As well as Johnson and (arguably) Cummings, the list of resignations/firings includes:
Neil Ferguson (leading pandemic modeller at Imperial College and SAGE member)
Catherine Calderwood (Scottish chief medical officer)
Margaret Ferrier (SNP MP)
Matt Hancock (Health Secretary)
The Gavin Newsom French Laundry scandal and such like would not have been survivable in the UK.
Partygate was bad because a lot of Johnson's support within the Conservative party was based on the (probably true) belief that his blokey charisma made him an irreplaceable electoral asset, and suddenly he wasn't. The fact that Boris lies constantly about everything was already priced in, and lying to the Commons about Partygate would have been survivable if he was still popular in the country.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Listing all the cases of high-profile politicians ignoring or carving out conveniently politician-shaped holes in restrictions would take a very, very long time. Via wealth, influence, the nature of their job etc, politicians could evade the worst effects of lockdowns. Taken at it's broadest, plenty of high-ranking Nazis did in fact subject themselves to the concentration camp. They just subjected themselves to it in a very different way than prisoners experienced.
Further, from information that has come out about decision-making over time, we know that many decisions were taken very lightly and for very frivolous reasons. For instance, it's a matter of public record at this point that the reason the UK government mandated face masks in secondary schools in England is because Nicola Sturgeon did it. This is not the behaviour of someone who is deeply concerned about violating personal liberties but believes via some utilitarian calculation that doing so is the least bad option.
That was pretty small fry all things considered, and not really a major imposition - after all, in the case of schools in particular they are a governmental institution, so imposing requirements there hardly seems like a grievous blow to personal liberty.
It's a bit worse than a footnote. Schooling is obligatory. You can't avoid having your children wearing a degrading symbol of submission to unjust authority (and one that increasingly looks like it harms your health) simply by not interacting with the schooling system because that is also illegal.
Further, it's part of a wider pattern that would need a whole book to comprehensively document. But to try to keep things as brief as possible, covid-sceptic backbencher MPs from the governing party repeatedly asked to be provided with cost-benefit analyses for restrictions. These were not provided, generally on the basis that it would be too complicated to provide a cost-benefit analysis (Effectively admitting they have no utilitarian justification for restrictions as they never bothered doing the work). On rare cases where cost-benefit analysis was done, such as with vaccinating children, if the numbers went against what the government wanted to do anyway the relevant institutions were overruled.
A world in which advocates of lockdowns backed them on the basis of a utilitarian calculation where personal liberties fell on the losing side looks very different than the one we actually got. For instance, by actually having an argument to present in favour of their policies, advocates of lockdowns would have spent less time and funding on slandering their opponents as substitute. I would still find them disagreeable, as abandoning personal liberties have huge second and third order effects that make the world more dangerous, but it would at least be comprehensible, and a far better debate than was actually had. However, utilitarian and cost-benefit analysis is not the argument that supporters of lockdowns advanced. Cost-benefit analysis was generally done by sceptics to try to understand or even steelman government decision making in the absence of them providing their own reasoning. That's what I did back in March-May 2020, and it was only when I realised that reasoning from the government was not forthcoming because it didn't exist that I went full anti-lockdown.
Decision-making during covid can't be comprehended through a lens of people making the least bad decisions possible. Rather, only by identifying an ideological commitment to restrictions for the sake of restrictions do the restrictions we got make any sense.
Edit for more considerations:
Regretfully committing human rights violations in a desperate effort to stop covid would resemble the ideas of proportionality such as in the Siracusa principles: Doing the absolute least violation of human rights possible to avert the bad outcome. To give examples:
And
This is not what we saw with the response to covid in the UK. At every level restrictions that were absent any evidence of effectiveness were imposed, which immediately violates the idea of doing the least bad thing possible. Even a single restriction existing for a vapid reason like "Sturgeon did it" would sink any claim of proportionality, but the number of restrictions that fit that category are quite extensive. To list some more examples:
Reintroduction of masks in winter 2021, regarded to be Boris retaliating against the general public for the crime of noticing partygate by some of his own backbenchers.
Masks in general, considering they lacked evidence of efficacy, still lack evidence of efficacy, and thus can never be a proportional violation of civil liberties.
Matter of public record that including children in rule of six had no rationale but was done anyway. It's likely that the entire rule of six thing has no rationale - inside baseball is that it is "six" because Gove thought it sounded better for sloganing than "eight".
Lack of policy to deal with covid tests that are determined to be false-positives following a more reliable PCR test, instead continuing to make children isolate despite not having covid, because doing so would be contradicting earlier statements about whether false-positives are a thing.
General lack of evidence that outdoor spread is a significant source of covid transmission compared to indoor spread, despite restrictions excessively targetting outdoor spread and arguably encouraging indoor spread.
That vaccines don't work to prevent transmission, which was at best a wild assumption made without evidence and then used to coerce people into being vaccinated against their judgement. And then to bring in vaccine mandates.
That children are harmed less by covid but harmed more by many restrictions, repeatedly ignored, violates proportionality
Like I said, needs a book to go through all of these.
More options
Context Copy link
"Government infringes personally liberty at government institutions" seems like a central example of "grievous blow to personal liberty", no?
The fact that the government also infringed the same liberties elsewhere (private businesses, not to mention "literally everywhere that isn't your own house") does not make it better!
Well not really, because it's their institution it hardly seems like a blow against liberty to impose rules on what is their own property. The point is that is hardly undermines the overall posture and messaging of the British government throughout the pandemic, which absolutely recognised the gravity of the decision being taken.
"L'etat, c'est nous" -- government property is your property.
Would a government policy saying that ethnic Irish aren't allowed in government buildings not seem like a major imposition on personal liberty to you?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link