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From the article, it sounds like our response to the pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights. The virus is not agentic, and what they descri
by econol0dge 6y ago
From the article, it sounds like our response to the pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights.
The virus is not agentic, and what they describe are intentional acts by human beings.
- xyzzyz 6y agoYes, the human beings at the top who wield unchecked tyrannical power.
- baryphonic 6y agoI have a contrarian take. The ones at the top wield very little power, and those who are 2-3 layers beneath them wield small nuggets of tyrannical power that, in the aggregate, translate to real unchecked - really, unaccountable - tyranny, but of a sort of purposeless variety. This isn't some crazy conjecture. The book "What Washington Gets Wrong" convinced me.[1] The same phenomenon happens across government, even in the national security, intel and law enforcement areas. In fact, it even happens in corporate America, where the top level execs are fairly well aligned with the interests of the owners, and most of the bad apples are found in middle management to a step or so below the C-suite. [1] https://www.amazon.com/What-Washington-Gets-Wrong-Misconceptions/dp/1633882497 https://www.amazon.com/What-Washington-Gets-Wrong-Misconcept...
- iso1210 6y agoThe reason religion, grand conspiracy theories, strongmen dictators, appeal to people is it gives them comfort that somebody is in charge. Jeff Bezos is the richest person on the planet. He doesn't have all the control, he doesn't even have significant control. Trump doesn't either. Nor does McConnell, or Pelosi, or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. They all have a little control, but ultimately even if all of those people worked together they still couldn't control the US. But I don't think that any middle managers etc are unaccountable individually either, but in aggregate they are. The value of good leaders is to herd the cats in roughly the right direction, perhaps nudging the direction along the way.
- roenxi 6y agoThis has been a consistent theme to responses to major crisis in US has faced in my lifetime - every time, after the crisis the situation is worse than it was before the crisis. Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID. The scars from the first two really should have healed a long time ago. It'll be a pretty dire future if the COVID response isn't completely unwound, some serious compromises to freedom were made through this.
- m0zg 6y agoQE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic. Luckily for us everyone else that matters (that is, who's not New Zealand) is equally fucked, so it's not entirely a losing proposition, but for someone of moderate means and with an income/savings that do not track the stock market these are perilous times indeed. Whatever cash or cash equivalent savings they had are turning into a pumpkin within a few years.
- goatinaboat 6y agoQE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic. 22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years. But we are still nowhere near Weimar levels of money printing, so that’s something. Except in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela of course but that was happening before COVID.
- lozenge 6y agoNew Zealand's lockdown was announced nine days before it had legal effect, a court case found that was illegal. Every country has let these values fall in one way or another.
- skrebbel 6y agoI think the Netherlands hasn't. In fact, commentators everywhere are yelling that they should make face masks obligatory, but they can't because the constitution prevents it (something about personal freedom of movement iirc). They have to pass a new law first and until then it's "strongly recommend". For reasons I don't get, the Freedom House picture on this article shows NL as orange, meaning that freedom and democracy eroded during the pandemic. I really wonder what's that about, it seems to me that the government tries very hard (too hard, according to just about every columnist and talk show guest) to respect everybody's personal freedoms. I'm pretty impressed, actually.
- Vinnl 6y agoMostly because there's lots of rule by decree that has been severely impacting our lives, I presume. That's why everyone's calling for the law to be passed (and also, of course, for that law to be a good law): to restore parliamentary oversight and unerode our democracy.
- dmurray 6y agoWe have something similar in Ireland: many of the coronavirus regulations (don't travel outside your county, don't have big gatherings in your home) don't have the force of law and/or the police don't have powers to enforce them. The government gave itself some emergency powers back in March, but these lapsed after I think 6 weeks and weren't renewed. The interesting question is why they didn't renew the emergency powers. They arguably weren't constitutional in the first place, but the only real challenge to them came from the conspiracy theorists /anti-vaxxers who got laughed out of court on about a hundred technicalities.
- lemming 6y agoThe court's decision was more nuanced than that. They basically argued that it was technically not legal for a brief period, but justified, necessary and reasonable under the circumstances. It wasn't exactly an erosion of democracy and respect for human rights, and the court made that very clear in their judgement. https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-08-2020/unlawful-but-necessary-and-reasonable-making-sense-of-the-high-court-ruling-on-the-lockdown/ https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-08-2020/unlawful-but-ne...