8 ms·

Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to

by titzer 5y ago

Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" just flat-out lied. They broke the public trust and did incalculable, permanent damage to societies' ability to react to crises in the future. It was self-serving, short-sighted, and frankly, the worst possible outcome. They clearly did not avoid a panic, did not avoid massive consequences, but, in the long run, deliberately injected distrust, hatred, and fear, deepening political divisions and driving us to the brink. And yet political leaders will face no consequences.

dgellow 5y ago
Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some? From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  > Which governments specifically? Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up. And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.
  - chimprich 5y ago
    > We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and saying "Well, you'll have to just take it on the chin". You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.
    - traceroute66 5y ago
      > He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot. By the time Boris started appearing on TV, COVID was already on the UK doorstep having marched through China, Asia and Europe. By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discussion.
      - scoopertrooper 5y ago
        That’s not actually lying though. Expressing an opinion is not lying.
        Clubber 5y ago
        Michael Jordan was a shitty basketball player. That's an opinion, am I lying?
        righttoolforjob 5y ago
        Except you don't actually believe it, so it's a lie, not an opinion.
        Clubber 5y ago
        I didn't say it was my opinion, I said it was an opinion. The person may or may not believe it, you don't know. Is it a lie even if they believe it? All people who are ______ are ______. Another opinion. Opinions can be intentionally or unintentionally deceiving, which makes them lies.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    'I was at a hospital where there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody,' the prime minister said on 3 March 2020 He back visiting a hospital, howwever this time as a patient in the ICU within a month.
  - sampo 5y ago
    > We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". In defense of Boris, UK scientific advisors Patrick Vallance and Roy M. Anderson advised to go for the "herd immunity" strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30567-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Then when the 16.3.2020 Imperial College report came out, Boris did announce he is changing the strategy. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51915302 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51915302
    - orra 5y ago
      I wouldn’t give PM Boris Johnson too much credit here. He regularly skipped crucial meetings at the start of the pandemic, and as PM he is ultimately accountable for his choice of advisors. Moreover, a year later his government had the gall to pretend that herd immunity through infection had never been the strategy. It's a post-truth government.
      - traceroute66 5y ago
        > I wouldn’t give PM Boris Johnson too much credit here. He regularly skipped crucial meetings at the start of the pandemic He did more than skip them, he remained thousands of miles away on holiday on a Caribbean island. Didn't deem it important enough to return early. You also forgot the Lockdown parties. ;-) Even before the party revelations, his and his government's handling of the pandemic was already well understood to be dire (dither & delay, too little too late, billions on dodgy contracts). Post-party revelations ? Whatever scraps of credibility that may have remained quickly took a long walk off a short pier. He and his supporters try to cling to his credibility on the back of the vaccines. But even that was dire. The completely un-necessary and embarrassing EU fighting and unfounded British exceptionalism over the vaccines, the false claims about AZ being a British invention when it is well documented that (something like) 75% of the AZ vaccine team are EU and Other nationals ... the list goes on.
  - 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
    > Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. Strange how the idea the UK mishandled the crisis persists, but at least one report [1] suggests otherwise, maybe the UK could have done better but certainly didn't do much worse than it's peers: United Kingdom excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 128 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 0.97) <- actually over reported deaths France excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 124 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.28) Spain excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 186 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.64) Italy excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 227 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.89) Poland excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 297 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 2.20) 1. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821%2902796-3 https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821... (PDF)
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  Fauci, who can probably be seen as the US government, lies: https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-... > have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. New rules are announced and rescinded a week later (e.g. Germany not ending quarantine of infected after all this week). During lockdowns, people were allowed to work in the same offices if required, but meeting anyone from outside your household was forbidden. Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach. I personally experienced police harassment for leaving the house. Green pass validity is still jumping back and forth (Austria). Let's not even get started on the endless amounts of lies, inaccuracies and moving goal posts surrounding the disappointing covid vaccines, the blacked out contracts to buy BILLIONS of them and the rejection of natural immunity after infection. Our governments have absolutely failed us and lost the last ounces of our trust they had.
  - gurkendoktor 5y ago
    Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point: I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy. The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandatory. That has sent my trust from low into negative territory.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      Yup. It is kind of a massive engineering failure. Everybody was doing exactly what they were incentivized to do. Everybody thought they were doing the right thing. But combined they drove the train right off the track. There was nothing in place to throw the brakes on and tell society to chill the fuck out. No amount of data or leadership could fix it. The worst part is anybody who dared point this out was met with fierce vitriol, shaming and general hatred. We were all just expected to fall in line and those who asked questions got shunned by society. In the first month or so it would have been possible for a good leader to chill things out. But eventually the thing grew legs of its own and nobody could put an end to it. Society would just have to wear itself out and one by one come to its senses. Two years later we are just now truly coming to our senses. Unfortunately it will take quite some time for this event to be remembered for what it truly was: the first true mass hysteria of the internet age.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Speaking for France, we had a lot of flat out lies throughout the pandemic. The most obvious one was on masks and their lack of protection, hammered week after week by the gov spokesperson, until there was enough masks to be distributed. Then masks started to be pushed by the gov, people were encouraged to make their own, and we all know the story from there. There was no lack of information or evidence, and they paid a lot to keep a full stock of emergency masks up until two years before the pandemic stroke (and then fucked up by giving up on emergency preparation). It was just plain criminal lying to avoid being confronted.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Masks in general provide very little protection. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm. Only properly fitted N95 (or equivalent) masks provide significant protection. Throughout the pandemic most people weren't wearing those, and those who did mostly wore them incorrectly. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=FEwYWMPWQ72FwsqddgKung https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      > Only properly fitted N95 (or equivalent) masks provide significant protection. This! This is the bulshit we got fed for almost 6 months. Paired with "people don't know how to properly fit N95 anyway", "you touch four face 20 times in an hour on average, you'd be touching your mask the same" etc. All of it with that specific condecending tone of "you plebes are not as informed as we policy makers are, we know best". This slowly turned around when heavy mask wearing countries were clearly doing leaps and bounds better, and they started backpedaling, explaining that there was not enough masks anyway. People also progressively stopped freaking out about having to cover their face (in France in particular it was a thorny subject due to past religious controversies) so they didn't need weird purist "if it's not perfect why bother ?" excuses anymore.
    - fivea 5y ago
- blub 5y ago
  Besides what a sibling comment said, in Germany the local (~county) governments gathered sloppy statistics (put people with unknown vaccination status in the unvaccinated column) and then justified that to restrict the freedom of movement of the unvaccinated, criticize them and make them into social pariahs. They’ve said they’re sorry though. Corona has given Western governments a taste of power and they’ve used that to silence critics and restrict civil liberties - often based on faulty data.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Given responses I got I guess I have way lower expectations than most. Yes we’ve seen a lot of fuck up, but given the insane circumstances things have been communicated and handled way better than I would have expected. Of course you will have a lot of contradictory or stupid decisions when you have to adapt that fast to a rapidly spreading, deadly virus that blocks your entire hospital system. The scale of the problem was insane.
chimprich 5y ago
> Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" Is that supposed to be a quote? It doesn't seem to be a quote from the article. Not creating a panic seems to be a sensible thing to do in most circumstances. You want people to react with appropriate concern to risks, but not behave irrationally.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  People are adults. You tell them the truth. Lies don’t work as well now that we have access to so much information. We now have a sizable percentage of people who not only don’t care what the WHO has to say, but also want to outright cut funding to the organization. Great outcome. Panick avoided.
  - fivea 5y ago
    > People are adults. No, not really. Not all, at least. I vividly recall from the start of the very first lockdown, when the only people expected to be outside were those attending pressing matters like restocking provisions on supermarket, the local police caught a middle age man who was avoiding the lockdown by strolling around repeatedly with the same days-old loaf of bread under his arm. He didn't even bothered to actually spend a few cents on his scheme, and reused the same loaf of bread every single day to go for a stroll. And let's not get started on refusals to adhere to simple basic personal higiene measures such as washing hands and wear a face mask, let alone vaccination rates. People might have the age of an adult, but too many people do not have the personal responsibility expected from adults.
    - slibhb 5y ago
      You've sorted people who disagree with you into the category of "not adults". Should they be able to vote? The example you chose is funny because, in my view, it's utterly insane that we ever had lockdowns preventing people from "going for a stroll". That you think any reasonable person ("an adult," apparently) agrees with you just shows how far off the reservation you've wandered.
Bancakes 5y ago
I think the governments did a great job at keeping the populace calm and ignorant of a virus with single digit death rates. Every hour spent researching the virus was better spent researching a good diet and fitness.
geysersam 5y ago
> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.
- bcrl 5y ago
  Misinformation is a problem and causes harm to society. Punishing people who knowingly spread misinformation despite having more accurate knowledge seems like a possible way of improving public discourse. It doesn't even need to be a massive penalty, a fine is probably sufficient in most cases to make someone think twice.
  - rambojohnson 5y ago
    you're not wrong, but if the last 5 years were any indication that is a naïve fallacy.
  - geysersam 5y ago
    It's too difficult to define misinformation to use as a concept that restricts free speech. Just look at how much we've learnt about corona viruses these last two years. Many widely accepted truths today might have been considered misinformation early on in the pandemic.
    - bcrl 5y ago
      Free speech doesn't mean free speech without consequences. If you slander someone, you open yourself up to being sued by that person. If you spread misinformation that provably harms society, I don't see why society can't sue you for the damage you cause.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  Collins and Fauci are not elected, though Collins had the decency to step down (after holding the longest tenure ever of an NIH director).
rayiner 5y ago
> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. To the contrary they will be rewarded.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  We will see in November what happens in the states. Personally I expect a bloodbath…

by titzer 5y ago

dgellow 5y ago

Which governments specifically? Also, you say that they failed to avoid panic but where have you seen some? From what I’ve seen some governments said a few incorrect or misleading things at a time where we had a lot of uncertainty and contradictory information. And then corrected once information became better. Overall western governments (I’m mostly familiar with Western Europe and the US) have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics, even when the US had Trump as president, someone who contributed actively to misinformation regarding the virus.

traceroute66 5y ago
> Which governments specifically? Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". Every man and his dog could see the slow car-crash coming. First China, then Asia, then Western Europe... the statistics and TV coverage was all there for everyone to see. But the UK government was in constant and total denial until the hospitals started clogging up. And even when the UK government finally admitted it, their handling was truly, truly dire. Constant failure to act, constant acting too late, constant u-turns, throwing 40-billion down the pan on dodgy contracts.
- chimprich 5y ago
  > We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and saying "Well, you'll have to just take it on the chin". You remember wrongly. He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. I think Boris has done very badly in his handling of the pandemic; given how many bad decisions he made, it's strange that people seem fixated on this thing he didn't say.
  - traceroute66 5y ago
    > He said we considered taking it on the chin, but decided against it. Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot. By the time Boris started appearing on TV, COVID was already on the UK doorstep having marched through China, Asia and Europe. By that time, even a five year old kid could have told you that "taking it on the chin" was not up for discussion.
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      That’s not actually lying though. Expressing an opinion is not lying.
      - Clubber 5y ago
        Michael Jordan was a shitty basketball player. That's an opinion, am I lying?
        righttoolforjob 5y ago
        Except you don't actually believe it, so it's a lie, not an opinion.
        Clubber 5y ago
        I didn't say it was my opinion, I said it was an opinion. The person may or may not believe it, you don't know. Is it a lie even if they believe it? All people who are ______ are ______. Another opinion. Opinions can be intentionally or unintentionally deceiving, which makes them lies.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  'I was at a hospital where there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody,' the prime minister said on 3 March 2020 He back visiting a hospital, howwever this time as a patient in the ICU within a month.
- sampo 5y ago
  > We all remember Boris Johnson going on TV and when asked about the images coming out of Italy said "Well, its nothing to worry about, you'll have to just take it on the chin". In defense of Boris, UK scientific advisors Patrick Vallance and Roy M. Anderson advised to go for the "herd immunity" strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pandemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Vallance#COVID-19_pand... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30567-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Then when the 16.3.2020 Imperial College report came out, Boris did announce he is changing the strategy. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51915302 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51915302
  - orra 5y ago
    I wouldn’t give PM Boris Johnson too much credit here. He regularly skipped crucial meetings at the start of the pandemic, and as PM he is ultimately accountable for his choice of advisors. Moreover, a year later his government had the gall to pretend that herd immunity through infection had never been the strategy. It's a post-truth government.
    - traceroute66 5y ago
      > I wouldn’t give PM Boris Johnson too much credit here. He regularly skipped crucial meetings at the start of the pandemic He did more than skip them, he remained thousands of miles away on holiday on a Caribbean island. Didn't deem it important enough to return early. You also forgot the Lockdown parties. ;-) Even before the party revelations, his and his government's handling of the pandemic was already well understood to be dire (dither & delay, too little too late, billions on dodgy contracts). Post-party revelations ? Whatever scraps of credibility that may have remained quickly took a long walk off a short pier. He and his supporters try to cling to his credibility on the back of the vaccines. But even that was dire. The completely un-necessary and embarrassing EU fighting and unfounded British exceptionalism over the vaccines, the false claims about AZ being a British invention when it is well documented that (something like) 75% of the AZ vaccine team are EU and Other nationals ... the list goes on.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
  > Erm, the US and UK ? Their handling has been dire. Strange how the idea the UK mishandled the crisis persists, but at least one report [1] suggests otherwise, maybe the UK could have done better but certainly didn't do much worse than it's peers: United Kingdom excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 128 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 0.97) <- actually over reported deaths France excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 124 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.28) Spain excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 186 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.64) Italy excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 227 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 1.89) Poland excess mortality per 100000 people due to Covid: 297 (ratio of actual excess deaths compared to reported: 2.20) 1. https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821%2902796-3 https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2821... (PDF)
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Fauci, who can probably be seen as the US government, lies: https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-... > have been quite good at communicating in the middle of a global pandemics Have they? It's a horrible back and forth, not based on any evidence. New rules are announced and rescinded a week later (e.g. Germany not ending quarantine of infected after all this week). During lockdowns, people were allowed to work in the same offices if required, but meeting anyone from outside your household was forbidden. Couples were arrested for sitting at the beach. I personally experienced police harassment for leaving the house. Green pass validity is still jumping back and forth (Austria). Let's not even get started on the endless amounts of lies, inaccuracies and moving goal posts surrounding the disappointing covid vaccines, the blacked out contracts to buy BILLIONS of them and the rejection of natural immunity after infection. Our governments have absolutely failed us and lost the last ounces of our trust they had.
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  Agree with everything you said, but want to add one more point: I have made my peace with all of these bureaucratic failures. Maybe a certain amount of contradiction and chaos is part of living in a democracy. The scary part is that at the same time there has been an authoritarian push to crack down on "disinformation", you know, like the lab leak theory, or the conspiracy theory that vaccination will become mandatory. That has sent my trust from low into negative territory.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Yup. It is kind of a massive engineering failure. Everybody was doing exactly what they were incentivized to do. Everybody thought they were doing the right thing. But combined they drove the train right off the track. There was nothing in place to throw the brakes on and tell society to chill the fuck out. No amount of data or leadership could fix it. The worst part is anybody who dared point this out was met with fierce vitriol, shaming and general hatred. We were all just expected to fall in line and those who asked questions got shunned by society. In the first month or so it would have been possible for a good leader to chill things out. But eventually the thing grew legs of its own and nobody could put an end to it. Society would just have to wear itself out and one by one come to its senses. Two years later we are just now truly coming to our senses. Unfortunately it will take quite some time for this event to be remembered for what it truly was: the first true mass hysteria of the internet age.
makeitdouble 5y ago
Speaking for France, we had a lot of flat out lies throughout the pandemic. The most obvious one was on masks and their lack of protection, hammered week after week by the gov spokesperson, until there was enough masks to be distributed. Then masks started to be pushed by the gov, people were encouraged to make their own, and we all know the story from there. There was no lack of information or evidence, and they paid a lot to keep a full stock of emergency masks up until two years before the pandemic stroke (and then fucked up by giving up on emergency preparation). It was just plain criminal lying to avoid being confronted.
- nradov 5y ago
  Masks in general provide very little protection. I recommend you listen to the explanations by infectious disease experts Dr. Monica Gandhi and Dr. Michael Osterholm. Only properly fitted N95 (or equivalent) masks provide significant protection. Throughout the pandemic most people weren't wearing those, and those who did mostly wore them incorrectly. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=FEwYWMPWQ72FwsqddgKung https://open.spotify.com/episode/5VSukFrMYGae1ILd0e4HuR?si=F...
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    > Only properly fitted N95 (or equivalent) masks provide significant protection. This! This is the bulshit we got fed for almost 6 months. Paired with "people don't know how to properly fit N95 anyway", "you touch four face 20 times in an hour on average, you'd be touching your mask the same" etc. All of it with that specific condecending tone of "you plebes are not as informed as we policy makers are, we know best". This slowly turned around when heavy mask wearing countries were clearly doing leaps and bounds better, and they started backpedaling, explaining that there was not enough masks anyway. People also progressively stopped freaking out about having to cover their face (in France in particular it was a thorny subject due to past religious controversies) so they didn't need weird purist "if it's not perfect why bother ?" excuses anymore.
  - fivea 5y ago
blub 5y ago
Besides what a sibling comment said, in Germany the local (~county) governments gathered sloppy statistics (put people with unknown vaccination status in the unvaccinated column) and then justified that to restrict the freedom of movement of the unvaccinated, criticize them and make them into social pariahs. They’ve said they’re sorry though. Corona has given Western governments a taste of power and they’ve used that to silence critics and restrict civil liberties - often based on faulty data.
dgellow 5y ago
Given responses I got I guess I have way lower expectations than most. Yes we’ve seen a lot of fuck up, but given the insane circumstances things have been communicated and handled way better than I would have expected. Of course you will have a lot of contradictory or stupid decisions when you have to adapt that fast to a rapidly spreading, deadly virus that blocks your entire hospital system. The scale of the problem was insane.

chimprich 5y ago

> Governments who "didn't want to create a panic" Is that supposed to be a quote? It doesn't seem to be a quote from the article. Not creating a panic seems to be a sensible thing to do in most circumstances. You want people to react with appropriate concern to risks, but not behave irrationally.

parkingrift 5y ago
People are adults. You tell them the truth. Lies don’t work as well now that we have access to so much information. We now have a sizable percentage of people who not only don’t care what the WHO has to say, but also want to outright cut funding to the organization. Great outcome. Panick avoided.
- fivea 5y ago
  > People are adults. No, not really. Not all, at least. I vividly recall from the start of the very first lockdown, when the only people expected to be outside were those attending pressing matters like restocking provisions on supermarket, the local police caught a middle age man who was avoiding the lockdown by strolling around repeatedly with the same days-old loaf of bread under his arm. He didn't even bothered to actually spend a few cents on his scheme, and reused the same loaf of bread every single day to go for a stroll. And let's not get started on refusals to adhere to simple basic personal higiene measures such as washing hands and wear a face mask, let alone vaccination rates. People might have the age of an adult, but too many people do not have the personal responsibility expected from adults.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    You've sorted people who disagree with you into the category of "not adults". Should they be able to vote? The example you chose is funny because, in my view, it's utterly insane that we ever had lockdowns preventing people from "going for a stroll". That you think any reasonable person ("an adult," apparently) agrees with you just shows how far off the reservation you've wandered.

Bancakes 5y ago

I think the governments did a great job at keeping the populace calm and ignorant of a virus with single digit death rates. Every hour spent researching the virus was better spent researching a good diet and fitness.

geysersam 5y ago

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. What consequences should they face? They are democratically elected. If the handling was indeed as terrible as you suggest I am sure they'll face the consequences in the next election.

bcrl 5y ago
Misinformation is a problem and causes harm to society. Punishing people who knowingly spread misinformation despite having more accurate knowledge seems like a possible way of improving public discourse. It doesn't even need to be a massive penalty, a fine is probably sufficient in most cases to make someone think twice.
- rambojohnson 5y ago
  you're not wrong, but if the last 5 years were any indication that is a naïve fallacy.
- geysersam 5y ago
  It's too difficult to define misinformation to use as a concept that restricts free speech. Just look at how much we've learnt about corona viruses these last two years. Many widely accepted truths today might have been considered misinformation early on in the pandemic.
  - bcrl 5y ago
    Free speech doesn't mean free speech without consequences. If you slander someone, you open yourself up to being sued by that person. If you spread misinformation that provably harms society, I don't see why society can't sue you for the damage you cause.
disambiguation 5y ago
Collins and Fauci are not elected, though Collins had the decency to step down (after holding the longest tenure ever of an NIH director).

rayiner 5y ago

> And yet political leaders will face no consequences. To the contrary they will be rewarded.

spookthesunset 5y ago
We will see in November what happens in the states. Personally I expect a bloodbath…