5 ms·

It is not the economic loss that is the problem, it is the totalitarian control that is now being advocated with foam in the mouth all over the place. “Those da

by tlear 7y ago

It is not the economic loss that is the problem, it is the totalitarian control that is now being advocated with foam in the mouth all over the place. “Those damn neighbors let kids out! Put them in prison” PRC is new model of what we should aspire to.. because they stopped the pandemic(after covering it up and letting it spread first)

cycrutchfield 7y ago
Imagine equating "quarantine" with "totalitarian control". When your parents put you in timeout did you equate it with being imprisoned?
- logicchains 7y ago
  >When your parents put you in timeout did you equate it with being imprisoned? That attitude that the government is like a parent and the citizens its child to be disciplined, as opposed to a humble servant to the citizens, is exactly the kind of totalitarianism the poster was referring to.
  - cycrutchfield 7y ago
    Actually, my point was not to draw a metaphor between the two scenarios I described, although that's a nice little gotcha I walked into. My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts.
    - logicchains 7y ago
      >My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts. My point is that it's generally accepted that children have less rights than adults. E.g. it's accepted for parents to lock their kid in a room for hours for swearing, but it's not accepted for the government to do the same thing. The fact that it's socially accepted to treat a child a certain way doesn't mean it's socially accepted for the government to treat adults the same way.
      - cycrutchfield 7y ago
        So you simply disagree with the concept of quarantines in general? Based on what, exactly? Like, specifically cite some case law that demonstrates that quarantines are unconstitutional.
        logicchains 7y ago
        I'm not American, so I'm not sure the relevance of case law here, but legality is not the same thing as morality. The idea of natural rights upon which the US constitution was built is that these are not granted by the state or some document, they are inherent to being human; "inalienable rights". Now if you're an at risk category you could argue that somebody coming near you and potentially infecting you is a violation of your rights similarly to how somebody punching you is, and that seems reasonable to me. But I think it'd be too much of a stretch to argue "those people spending time together at a bar might increase my chance of being infected, so they shouldn't be allowed to congregate", especially when this very directly violates their rights of movement and association. Similarly for the argument about not having enough hospital beds due to other people getting infected: the classical idea of rights was as "negative rights", not "positive rights". A negative right means you have the right that somebody else will not do something to you, whereas a positive right means that you have the right for somebody else to do something to you (or, somebody else has the obligation to do something for you). Positive rights necessarily impinge on negative rights. Since requiring hospital care is a positive right, not a negative right, approaching it from a system of negative rights one wouldn't have any right to restrict other peoples behaviour under the justification that it would improve your access to hospital care.
        cycrutchfield 7y ago
        Inalienable rights are not without limits, at least within the American system of governance. You have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and endanger others' lives. Similarly, you have the right of free assembly, but not when it puts others' lives at risk. And regardless of the legal/moral distinction, I would suggest that these limitations are both legal as well as moral.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    If one side behaves stupidly and the other has power and motivation to stop it, then parent-child dynamics is unavoidable. And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy. The best government is the one that harms the citizens as little as possible in the process of taking value from them to give it to the people that sit on all the weaponry, so they don't take whatever they want with that weaponry. Everything else is a sideshow aimed at improving the stability of this setup.
    - logicchains 7y ago
      >If one side behaves stupidly and the other has power and motivation to stop it, then parent-child dynamics is unavoidable. It's not as simple as stupid. Humans have different values and risk preferences, and all values are ultimately arbitrary so there's no objective way to say some values are better than others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument). In that case people have highly conflicting values in terms of weighing up loss of life against destruction of peoples' standards of living. People also have conflicting estimates about how much economic damage the shutdowns will cause, so even if they did have the same values they wouldn't necessarily agree. >And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy. This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way..
      - scotty79 7y ago
        stupidly = contrary to knowledge Most relevant knowledge at the moment comes from epidemiology. The most important value we have to take into account at the moment is that suffocating to death is very bad and we want to inflict this upon least amount of people possible. Money is just a way of keeping tabs of to how much of the output of our civilisation every entity is entitled to. We did it sort of dilligently in hopes of encouraging people to increase the output of civilisation. It kinda works but also led us to dog tailors, Jeff Bezos private wealth and cruise ship industry and various other crap so there's definitely room for improvement. Lots of people hope that economy won't crash but will be knocked out of this local optimum it sits stuck in for at least few decades. > This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way.. This is an argument that they always behave in authoritarian way. The only thing you can hope for is that they bother you the least amount possible while doing their thing which is taking part of your output. You had rights because it was beneficial for the government to give you rights. Epidemic changed that. When it subsides if it will still be beneficial for the government to give you rights back, you'll get them. If government fails, army will step in to take what they want from you more directly.

by tlear 7y ago

cycrutchfield 7y ago

Imagine equating "quarantine" with "totalitarian control". When your parents put you in timeout did you equate it with being imprisoned?

logicchains 7y ago
>When your parents put you in timeout did you equate it with being imprisoned? That attitude that the government is like a parent and the citizens its child to be disciplined, as opposed to a humble servant to the citizens, is exactly the kind of totalitarianism the poster was referring to.
- cycrutchfield 7y ago
  Actually, my point was not to draw a metaphor between the two scenarios I described, although that's a nice little gotcha I walked into. My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    >My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts. My point is that it's generally accepted that children have less rights than adults. E.g. it's accepted for parents to lock their kid in a room for hours for swearing, but it's not accepted for the government to do the same thing. The fact that it's socially accepted to treat a child a certain way doesn't mean it's socially accepted for the government to treat adults the same way.
    - cycrutchfield 7y ago
      So you simply disagree with the concept of quarantines in general? Based on what, exactly? Like, specifically cite some case law that demonstrates that quarantines are unconstitutional.
      - logicchains 7y ago
        I'm not American, so I'm not sure the relevance of case law here, but legality is not the same thing as morality. The idea of natural rights upon which the US constitution was built is that these are not granted by the state or some document, they are inherent to being human; "inalienable rights". Now if you're an at risk category you could argue that somebody coming near you and potentially infecting you is a violation of your rights similarly to how somebody punching you is, and that seems reasonable to me. But I think it'd be too much of a stretch to argue "those people spending time together at a bar might increase my chance of being infected, so they shouldn't be allowed to congregate", especially when this very directly violates their rights of movement and association. Similarly for the argument about not having enough hospital beds due to other people getting infected: the classical idea of rights was as "negative rights", not "positive rights". A negative right means you have the right that somebody else will not do something to you, whereas a positive right means that you have the right for somebody else to do something to you (or, somebody else has the obligation to do something for you). Positive rights necessarily impinge on negative rights. Since requiring hospital care is a positive right, not a negative right, approaching it from a system of negative rights one wouldn't have any right to restrict other peoples behaviour under the justification that it would improve your access to hospital care.
        cycrutchfield 7y ago
        Inalienable rights are not without limits, at least within the American system of governance. You have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and endanger others' lives. Similarly, you have the right of free assembly, but not when it puts others' lives at risk. And regardless of the legal/moral distinction, I would suggest that these limitations are both legal as well as moral.
- scotty79 7y ago
  If one side behaves stupidly and the other has power and motivation to stop it, then parent-child dynamics is unavoidable. And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy. The best government is the one that harms the citizens as little as possible in the process of taking value from them to give it to the people that sit on all the weaponry, so they don't take whatever they want with that weaponry. Everything else is a sideshow aimed at improving the stability of this setup.
  - logicchains 7y ago
    >If one side behaves stupidly and the other has power and motivation to stop it, then parent-child dynamics is unavoidable. It's not as simple as stupid. Humans have different values and risk preferences, and all values are ultimately arbitrary so there's no objective way to say some values are better than others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument). In that case people have highly conflicting values in terms of weighing up loss of life against destruction of peoples' standards of living. People also have conflicting estimates about how much economic damage the shutdowns will cause, so even if they did have the same values they wouldn't necessarily agree. >And government will never be your humble servants no matter how much literature you will produce on the subject. They have tanks, you do not. Shepard is never a servant of the sheep. Even though he feeds them and keeps them safe and healthy. This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way..
    - scotty79 7y ago
      stupidly = contrary to knowledge Most relevant knowledge at the moment comes from epidemiology. The most important value we have to take into account at the moment is that suffocating to death is very bad and we want to inflict this upon least amount of people possible. Money is just a way of keeping tabs of to how much of the output of our civilisation every entity is entitled to. We did it sort of dilligently in hopes of encouraging people to increase the output of civilisation. It kinda works but also led us to dog tailors, Jeff Bezos private wealth and cruise ship industry and various other crap so there's definitely room for improvement. Lots of people hope that economy won't crash but will be knocked out of this local optimum it sits stuck in for at least few decades. > This isn't exactly an argument that governments aren't behaving in an authoritarian way.. This is an argument that they always behave in authoritarian way. The only thing you can hope for is that they bother you the least amount possible while doing their thing which is taking part of your output. You had rights because it was beneficial for the government to give you rights. Epidemic changed that. When it subsides if it will still be beneficial for the government to give you rights back, you'll get them. If government fails, army will step in to take what they want from you more directly.