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Remember when the US invaded Iraq to "find weapons of mass destruction"? Then a year or two later that shifted to "fighting the terrorist there so we don't have

Remember when the US invaded Iraq to "find weapons of mass destruction"? Then a year or two later that shifted to "fighting the terrorist there so we don't have to fight them here", then "winning hearts and minds" or something. Once you get a mandate for a large-scale, politically charged activity it will never stop; the goal posts will be moved again and again, as many times as it takes and as often as necessary to put the "other side" on the defensive. We're many weeks past "three weeks to flatten the curve", every week we hear more excuses. My friends pick them up and start parroting them in near perfect unison. I don't actually have any Republican friends, but if I did I'm sure I'd hear something similar from them too. This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was (I also remember the response to AIDS being somewhat less dramatic than to COVID), this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. If it means thousands of your followers are discouraged from taking potentially life saving vaccinations (that you yourself have taken) and die as a result, so be it. If it means subjecting billions of people to years of unnecessary and demonstrably ineffective pandemic theater, crushing the financial future of the next generations, and destroying vast swaths of small businesses people have spent their lives building while realizing unprecedented returns on your own portfolio, so be it. The people running this do not care about any of this in the slightest, it's just an excuse to enrich themselves, and for a certain segment of the upper middle class to feel morally superior to others while they take Zoom calls from home and order dinners from Seamless. I guess this is getting boring for them now, so we're starting to be allowed to hear a trickle of stories like this.

spookthesunset 5y ago
These restrictions are so classist and so harmful to the underprivileged and working class it amazes me that the party that is championing them is the one who claims to represent said classes. Almost all of what I thought was true about my political allegiance fell completely apart over the last two years.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
> This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was, this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. yeah it's all a big conspiracy to put the bars and restaurants out of business for sinister reasons that are beyond imagination.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  People stop patronizing bars, restaurants, shops, etc, instead spend their leisure time/money/etc on infinitely more scalable digital services. Beyond imagination?
- throw__away7391 5y ago
  Don't be daft. This is exactly the kind of parroted narrative I'm talking about. It's obvious to any objective observer how this has played out. Initially, three weeks of shutdown, combined with a stimulus program, was going to be painful but bearable. We laid off a bunch of people, cancelled raises, and prepared for a recession. When the "elite" saw how well their stocks, companies, and real estate holdings were doing, well suddenly this didn't seem so bad--for some folks like me and probably you as well. Then, very quickly, it got politicized and ritualized. I can absolutely guarantee you if home values had cratered, if large businesses were getting their lunch eaten by small businesses, if stocks were on a two year decline and continued to fall, if WFH was only possible for low wage hourly workers, things would look very different and these restrictions would have been lifted a long time ago. Now wearing a mask for 20 seconds while I walk 2 or 3 meters from the door of a restaurant to the table, only to immediately take it off for an hour to eat dinner isn't a practical mater, its symbolic--the mask is the new flag pin. The staff still needs to wear masks for their whole shift of course--all these COVID measures are falling disproportionately on service workers, I am going through life mostly free from any inconvenience while all the hourly worker I interact with wear masks, "sanitize" any surface I come into contact with, and perform all sorts of extra, mostly meaningless precautions to "keep me safe". I've never worked a job like this, but I can't imagine spending 8 hours sweating in a kitchen with a mask on is much fun.
  - Tiktaalik 5y ago
    You haven't really explained how the rich elites are benefiting from mask mandates and restaurant capacity limits. It's actually really annoying to rich people. If you're suggesting that this was all a big opportunity to lay people off, well, the problem with this theory is that the economy has rebounded and (at least in Canada) we're back at full economic capacity and have re-hired everyone. > “Employment is now 102.1% above pre-pandemic levels and is among the highest in Canada. This means 56,000 more people are employed in B.C. today compared to before the pandemic. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022JERI0001-000017 https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022JERI0001-000017 Dealing with the pandemic cost the government a fortune in new debt, which elites generally don't like. If the pandemic was some scheme by the ultra rich elites to enrich themselves they probably would have done nothing and let the poors die.

spookthesunset 5y ago

These restrictions are so classist and so harmful to the underprivileged and working class it amazes me that the party that is championing them is the one who claims to represent said classes. Almost all of what I thought was true about my political allegiance fell completely apart over the last two years.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

> This is no longer about fighting a disease, if it ever was, this is about securing access to resources and power for one group over another. yeah it's all a big conspiracy to put the bars and restaurants out of business for sinister reasons that are beyond imagination.

yanmaani 5y ago
People stop patronizing bars, restaurants, shops, etc, instead spend their leisure time/money/etc on infinitely more scalable digital services. Beyond imagination?
throw__away7391 5y ago
Don't be daft. This is exactly the kind of parroted narrative I'm talking about. It's obvious to any objective observer how this has played out. Initially, three weeks of shutdown, combined with a stimulus program, was going to be painful but bearable. We laid off a bunch of people, cancelled raises, and prepared for a recession. When the "elite" saw how well their stocks, companies, and real estate holdings were doing, well suddenly this didn't seem so bad--for some folks like me and probably you as well. Then, very quickly, it got politicized and ritualized. I can absolutely guarantee you if home values had cratered, if large businesses were getting their lunch eaten by small businesses, if stocks were on a two year decline and continued to fall, if WFH was only possible for low wage hourly workers, things would look very different and these restrictions would have been lifted a long time ago. Now wearing a mask for 20 seconds while I walk 2 or 3 meters from the door of a restaurant to the table, only to immediately take it off for an hour to eat dinner isn't a practical mater, its symbolic--the mask is the new flag pin. The staff still needs to wear masks for their whole shift of course--all these COVID measures are falling disproportionately on service workers, I am going through life mostly free from any inconvenience while all the hourly worker I interact with wear masks, "sanitize" any surface I come into contact with, and perform all sorts of extra, mostly meaningless precautions to "keep me safe". I've never worked a job like this, but I can't imagine spending 8 hours sweating in a kitchen with a mask on is much fun.
- Tiktaalik 5y ago
  You haven't really explained how the rich elites are benefiting from mask mandates and restaurant capacity limits. It's actually really annoying to rich people. If you're suggesting that this was all a big opportunity to lay people off, well, the problem with this theory is that the economy has rebounded and (at least in Canada) we're back at full economic capacity and have re-hired everyone. > “Employment is now 102.1% above pre-pandemic levels and is among the highest in Canada. This means 56,000 more people are employed in B.C. today compared to before the pandemic. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022JERI0001-000017 https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022JERI0001-000017 Dealing with the pandemic cost the government a fortune in new debt, which elites generally don't like. If the pandemic was some scheme by the ultra rich elites to enrich themselves they probably would have done nothing and let the poors die.