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I think the acceptability of lockdowns entirely depends on where you were in the social ladder. The reason it was initially accepted was the for the PMC and elites, it was basically “work from home in your pajamas, order in, and be told it was all for the greater good.” For them, it was vacation more or less, and they used the time they would have spent commuting baking bread and making terrible videos of themselves dancing. For ordinary people it was absolutely a catastrophe. If your small business wasn’t essential, well, basically you were literally fucked. Sorry about that, but gotta protect people from the Coof. Likewise for people who worked for those businesses, again basically the government forced them out of work, made getting unemployment nearly impossible, and gave them $2000. If they did still have a job because they were fortunate enough to work for a place that the government deemed essential, the rules and regulations made the work more difficult and uncomfortable. Factories and meat processors work at pretty good speed in normal circumstances and you have to move quickly to keep up. Remove a third of the workforce, it’s much harder. Some of those jobs lack climate control, making the required masking miserable.
In part a good point. But I'm friends with plenty of 'ordinary' non-elite people (lol!), and the general vibe I got wasn't catastrophe. I think it was well within the norm of 'bad things that happen sometimes', and as an example I think the great recession was worse.
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