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Uh... Why are you a single issue anti lockdown person? Was it really so horrible to be forced to be told what to do and stay at home more than usual?
The lockdowns were actually pretty great for me, personally - I could relocate to a much cheaper place while getting paid the same, without any pushback from the corporate overlords, because WFH became the norm. But I think the fact that this thing happened in America without any serious pushback is a horrible thing, and everybody complicit in it has my full personal disgust and hate.
Most of the hate for lockdowns just smacks of "I don't care if additional millions of old and vulnerable people had died, the virus wasn't dangerous to me personally and forcing me to conform and sacrifice is a great crime". There was reason for lockdowns and they saved lives, yet people on this site tend to deny that. Although, yes, the details of their implementations were often idiotic.
That's some vile bullshit. NY governor - and others - directly caused deaths of thousands by their policies of forced admittance of sick individuals in the nursing homes with healthy ones. But if I want to go to a beach - alone - and swim in the sea, I am killing the elderly. Elites dined in large luxurious companies, maskless - but if I go to a store, I can not buy anything beyond pre-approved list, because I am killing the elderly. Politicians called to go to the Chinatown and hug random people there because this would show I'm not racist, politicians condone mass riots smack in the middle of pandemic because "fighting racism is more important for public health" - but if I meet two friends for a glass of beer, I am killing the elderly. Screw that. I would consider accepting the baloney about "sacrifice" if the people who demand sacrifices from me behaved like they think it is serious. When they proudly stood maskless in front on masked servants, this is not "sacrifice" - this is showing that they are the patricians and we are the plebeians. When they closed down businesses, but had them private open for them on the down low - this is not "sacrifice", this is oppression. When they destroyed thousands of small businesses while "disappearing" tens of billions of dollars of "covid fund" - this is not "sacrifice", this is fraud.
No they did not. You can worship this idol however you want, you can believe that dances with tambоurinеs, sacrifice of chickens and wearing special religious garments and performing elaborate rituals is the only thing that keeps the world from collapse. That's you religion, and I won't say anything about it, it's between you and whatever gods or other entities you worship. But when you try to force me into your religion, when you deny all empiric evidence and logic in service of your religious dogma, and when you lay all the atrocities that fellows of your religion committed - at my feet, I have nothing to say but "screw that". Your attempt at emotional blackmail failed.
People on this site deny that too: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00461-0/fulltext
In other words, mandates help lowering infection rate among low-risk populations, but did nothing for high risk populations. In more mundane words, all this destruction and fascism was so we could have the cough a couple of months later than otherwise, with no change in outcome.
Oh, sorry, I forgot - true socialism has been never tried. Maybe next time.
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millions of old and vulnerable people did die and comparisons between places with lockdowns and not lockdowns (and varying levels of lockdowns) do not buttress the claim they reduced mortality even in that target group
someone sure is in denial of something, and it's the person who has to rely on an unsupported counterfactual of "sure millions of old and vulnerable people did die anyway, alone, cloistered off from their family, and not being taken care of by terrified medical staff as they drowned in their own fluid, and at an absurd cost in wealth and human rights violations, but more totally would have died without it"
once you account for those who died anyway and the enormous cost in wealth, lives, and rights violations, the lockdowns comes into focus as the stupidest public policy decision of the last 100 years and I hope each of you who supported such lunacy is constantly reminded of it like an albatross around their neck
and it wasn't only stupid in hindsight (it's preposterously stupid in hindsight), it was stupid at the time with relevant data and evidence at the time which was entirely ignored for reasons we're all left to speculate; Should we 1) use flu pandemic guidelines carefully crafted over 100 years in response to real world diseases or 2) throw those away and launch into a vastly costly global experiment with next to zero scientific support while refusing to engage in any sort of cost-benefit analysis whatsoever?
characterizing lockdowns as mere "conforming" and "forced to stay at home more than usual" is asininely dishonest
and stinks of someone whose cost for lockdowns was either near zero or positive
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That's the one great legacy of covid. It took that big exogenous shock to move the needle toward remote work. The viability of such work was mostly speculative before then.
A giant blow against an Office Space-style quality of life pain point.
Yes. I am seeing companies who didn't touch WFH with a ten-foot pole now opening remote positions. Once this happens, there's no stopping it - even if you ban WFH, people would just leave for a company that doesn't. Unless you pay fabulously well - which only a small percentage of companies does, and even for them it may be not fabulous enough to justify living in a place like San Francisco - you'd just get your market reduced, that's all. Only a total memetic blockade of WFH on the management level has been sustaining the "local only" model, but this has been broken and I don't think it's coming back. It can come back in certain companies, but not industry-wide.
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I had two small children with special education needs entering the education system right as the lockdowns started, and I’m more or less working class without the resources for private education and therapy, so naturally as the lockdowns went on I was filled with white hot nuclear rage at those responsible for them.
You ever seen a toddler do speech therapy with a mask on with masked adults?
Trust me when I say it’s one of the most frustrating, pointless exercises you could witness. Especially when it’s your kid.
That and the fact that my industry was completely devastated by the lockdowns as it was all in person work.
And I live in a heavily blue state.
So me and mine were absolutely the type of people sacrificed at the altar so that overweight, CNN addicted middle age office workers could have the perception of safety.
I can't believe how many lockdown supporters are still around.
The lockdowns...
Didn't work.
Had massive negative side effects.
Were an illegal imposition against personal rights.
This leaves just one weak pillar of support: "I personally benefited".
We recognize it's evil when a Halliburton exec benefits from a cruel and unnecessary war. It's also evil for people to support lockdowns because they personally came out ahead.
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The "pandemic" was a period in which many societies and governments dropped the mask on pluralism, burned the hitherto observed social contract, and stopped just short of putting guns to people's heads to tell them "do as we say or else", purely to force people into obedience for no good reason and many bad ones. And they stopped not because they came to their senses, but because the war in the Ukraine distracted them.
Seeing what petty tyranny lurks behind the thinning facade of supposedly liberal society can have a sobering effect.
It really was a mask off moment. We could see which people in power had principles (very few) vs. who was just playing team baseball (almost everyone).
Even the author of fucking "Manufacturing Consent" revealed himself to be more than willing to be a fascist if it was for the right team.
In my own personal life, I've learned to give people more charity and grace for having the wrong opinions. How could I do otherwise, when almost everyone fell under the spell? As for my friends who held firm against the tidal wave of bullshit I now have a much stronger connection and respect. It's like a secret club of people who you can really trust.
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I object to being falsely imprisoned.
Do you really even have to ask? Seriously, I don't understand how this can be so mysterious? What next, will you ask why Uyghurs don't like reeducation camps?
You were not imprisoned.
So there was no criminal penalties being threatened for me leaving a location? Strange. I seem to quite clearly remember the law saying exactly that.
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It is mysterious becuase it looks like you're grouping "reeducation camps" and "lockdowns" together on the basis on how legally similar they are - not on how horrible the experience is.
Lockdowns are not as bad as being on the business end of a genocide.
That being said, they were really, really bad. I would be prepared to forgive and forget if they were taught as a ‘never again’ moment and written into history books as the worst human rights violations in the modern west, Fauci and whitmer as unambiguous villains, and anti-lockdown activists as brave freedom fighters who admittedly believed some crazy things, but let’s not focus on that.
This is not how the establishments in western countries want to record things- lockdowns were some combination of a false memory, tragically necessary, and a mistake but not that bad. So yes, I’m still very angry about them, and it’s a perfectly justifiable degree of hyperbole above.
It makes sense to speak against lockdowns because they were actually harmful in ways you can describe, like the guy above with his children who couldn't do speech therapy with masks on, or because they were dumb and unproductive/counterproductive towards their stated goal. Or it makes sense to speak against the government for moving the goalposts and Fauci-ing it up.
Tophattingson on the other hand, the whole idea I get from his posts, is all about how they're bad because they're somewhat like imprisonment according to its dictionary definition, and imprisonment is against human rights as written by libertarians, and therefore they must be the Worst Evil Ever. I cannot help but associate this kind of legalesthetic thinking and tunnel vision with sovereign citizens.
Do you honestly believe they were the worst human rights violation, or is it just a condition for forgiving and forgetting?
I hate them for all the other reasons too. I simply add one more reason. I do not think it would be productive for me to drop hundreds of examples of specific lockdown harms though if you do want specific examples I can provide them.
We had norms against what happened in 2020 for a reason (if you think they were not norms, find me pre-2020 lockdown advocates). Arbitrary home imprisonment of the entire population is not a power that the public typically granted the state. It is not a power that a state can safely have access to. Even if they used it correctly in 2020 it would be dangerous, but the actual course of events demonstrates it's danger: A state powerful enough to imprison everyone is powerful enough to fabricate the reason why it's doing so. Evidence: They did it for covid. Because of this, there is no safe way to grant a state this power even if there's a hypothetical virus/pandemic/whatever that would warrant doing so.
That's the additional argument I present. Simply tallying up the costs of lockdowns vs the costs of covid creates the impression that there could be a good lockdown in the right circumstance. I disagree because I think the risks of a state that can do a lockdown are far greater than any benefit they could create, as demonstrated by what happened in 2020. The best schelling point to protect against this, and the one we used pre-2020, is to prohibit arbitrary imprisonment. I am distraught that we have since abandoned this protection.
Sovereign citizens believe they are following the law albeit it's a law that does not actually exist. They think there's magic legal cheat codes that let them ignore certain laws. I'm saying fuck the law if it's like this. Those are very different positions.
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Individually, no. Socially, hell yes, they were violation on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Not sure about human rights, but something was violated there.
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I mean they are exactly like imprisonment as currently practiced for minor-ish criminals -- enforced house arrest with allowances to leave under limited circumstances. If you think that being against arbitrary imprisonment is on the libertarian end of the spectrum that's fine I guess -- but I wonder where it puts you on the political compass?
I am against arbitrary imprisonment, it's just that we're using different definitions of "arbitrary". The word invokes "literally no correlation with any external reasons other than 'we said so'" to me, and to anti-lockdowners, I guess, "when they didn't ask our opinion"? "When it wasn't in response to anything I personally did"? Maybe you can clarify.
I find this whole rhetoric around it reminiscent of "taxation is theft", to which I respond "well then, I support organized theft that doesn't ruin the targets with redistribution towards societal needs and don't support targeted theft that sometimes ruins targets and only enriches the thief".
Arbitrary imprisonment is defined by imprisoning people who have not committed or are not suspected of committing a crime. This is because totalitarian regimes can always present a reason to imprison someone that correlates with an external reason. They are a political dissident, they disagree with the government, they are nebulously dangerous etc. The problem is that these reasonings are illegitimate deployments of the state's power, clearly being used only to perpetuate it's power rather than for the purposes we allow the state to imprison people (some combination of protect/rehabilitation/justice for victims).
Lockdowns are still this to me. There was no correlation with any external reason. There was no evidence base for lockdowns prior to them being carried out. There is still no evidence base for lockdowns. Therefore I do not believe states did lockdowns for the reason they claimed they did so.
The majority of non-libertarian conceptions of the state, and even many libertarian ones, view legitimate states as a transaction. We give up some things in return for an organisation that will, ultimately, serve us in return. Taxes are expected to pay for services from the government, not simply fatten the president's wallet (that we specifically call the latter corruption or embezzlement should hint at that). Police are expected to protect civilians from criminals, not protect the government from disagreement. Prisons are expected to house criminals, not political opponents.
In 2019, someone who doesn't want the government to put everyone under house arrest on a dubious whim was called a person. In 2020, they're called a libertarian.
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This one -- imprisoning people for something that they might do (with no evidence that they will) was the stuff of dystopic movies until 2020. (and not at all the same as traditional quarantines, before you trot that one out)
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Lockdowns were like imprisonment for me. Like a prolonged home arrest for no reason. Somehow it was very clear that they will be useless and the policies didn't even make sense.
Yes, they were the worst human rights violations in the western world since the war ended or something like that.
Only when you widen your comparison to places where wars and genocide still happens (Ukraine, other wars, Uigurs etc.), we can find examples with even worse violations.
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For a given definition of ‘modern’ and ‘west’, yes.
I don’t consider Serbia in the 90s western and don’t call the Holocaust modern in the sense I’m talking about.
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