6 ms·

This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends. ALL our freedoms are attacked: the soci

This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends. ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better). When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship. As I said I'm not from the UK but as far as I know people in London had more freedom during the WWII aerial bombings.

detritus 6y ago
During Rationing, you mean?
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Yes. During rationing.
onion2k 6y ago
When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship. On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Why does there have to be a dichotomy here? Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown. That seems to be the most humane option. Make it illegal to evict people, provide them with a reasonable base income that allows them to lead a dignified life through the lockdown, and then shut everything down for a little while. Suggesting that the lockdown is synonymous with loss of livelihood is exactly the problem here. Surely the same elected officials that have the power to close everything down also have the power to authorize emergency payments to those impacted by the lockdown.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    > Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown. Well, that's will just establish a beachhead for socialism, and that is reserved for big business.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  Frankly, people are always dying. Deaths don't automatically outweigh everything. This logic quickly breaks down once you apply it consistently. Traffic accidents are a huge cause of deaths, yet we don't ban all vehicles. There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Such as suicides due to depression amplified by social isolation. Those costs should be factored in. It's not as simple as a blanket "people are dying so everything is justified".
  - wonnage 6y ago
    How many of those suicides are from people who are broke for pandemic-related reasons, and could've been prevented had we controlled the pandemic early (i.e, with a strict lockdown)?
    - scarby2 6y ago
      Devils advocate: how many of those suicides are caused directly by the restrictions and not the pandemic, how many extra would have lost their sanity due to a stricter lockdown? Truth is we're not taking much time to measure the non-covid, non economic outcomes
      - wonnage 6y ago
        The whole point of a strict lockdown would've been to nip the problem in the bud via drastic measures. Based on the experiences of other countries, it should've lasted about 3-4 weeks.
        read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        I think this idea is idealistic. It's easy to say now that we should've reacted immediately. But try just getting public support for drastic lockdown measures when the virus was new enough to have about as much impact on people's daily lives as the latest hospital bombing somewhere in Afghanistan.
jacobsenscott 6y ago
There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions. Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time. Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship. As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control. Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.
djur 6y ago
So far the outcome of the "disgusting spectacle" in the US has provided evidence against the risk of incipient dictatorship, not for it. States mobilized to various degrees of success to enable voting despite the pandemic, and the result was the highest turnout since 1900. And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom#Second_World_War_1939%E2%80%931945 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

detritus 6y ago

During Rationing, you mean?

jtbayly 6y ago
Yes. During rationing.

onion2k 6y ago

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship. On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.

jschwartzi 6y ago
Why does there have to be a dichotomy here? Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown. That seems to be the most humane option. Make it illegal to evict people, provide them with a reasonable base income that allows them to lead a dignified life through the lockdown, and then shut everything down for a little while. Suggesting that the lockdown is synonymous with loss of livelihood is exactly the problem here. Surely the same elected officials that have the power to close everything down also have the power to authorize emergency payments to those impacted by the lockdown.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  > Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown. Well, that's will just establish a beachhead for socialism, and that is reserved for big business.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
Frankly, people are always dying. Deaths don't automatically outweigh everything. This logic quickly breaks down once you apply it consistently. Traffic accidents are a huge cause of deaths, yet we don't ban all vehicles. There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Such as suicides due to depression amplified by social isolation. Those costs should be factored in. It's not as simple as a blanket "people are dying so everything is justified".
- wonnage 6y ago
  How many of those suicides are from people who are broke for pandemic-related reasons, and could've been prevented had we controlled the pandemic early (i.e, with a strict lockdown)?
  - scarby2 6y ago
    Devils advocate: how many of those suicides are caused directly by the restrictions and not the pandemic, how many extra would have lost their sanity due to a stricter lockdown? Truth is we're not taking much time to measure the non-covid, non economic outcomes
    - wonnage 6y ago
      The whole point of a strict lockdown would've been to nip the problem in the bud via drastic measures. Based on the experiences of other countries, it should've lasted about 3-4 weeks.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        I think this idea is idealistic. It's easy to say now that we should've reacted immediately. But try just getting public support for drastic lockdown measures when the virus was new enough to have about as much impact on people's daily lives as the latest hospital bombing somewhere in Afghanistan.

jacobsenscott 6y ago

There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions. Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time. Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship. As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control. Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.

djur 6y ago

So far the outcome of the "disgusting spectacle" in the US has provided evidence against the risk of incipient dictatorship, not for it. States mobilized to various degrees of success to enable voting despite the pandemic, and the result was the highest turnout since 1900. And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdom#Second_World_War_1939%E2%80%931945 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...