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I’ll preface my response by saying I’ve leaned libertarian/Laissez-faire for much of my (now lengthy) adult life, and I’ve liked plenty of what I’ve seen you wr

I’ll preface my response by saying I’ve leaned libertarian/Laissez-faire for much of my (now lengthy) adult life, and I’ve liked plenty of what I’ve seen you write on HN before (I recognize your handle as we met personally at YC many years ago). I say that to point out that I don’t think we’re coming at this with strongly opposing ideological priors. To your response: - I myself was concerned by some of the measures and the risk of overreach and permanence of the measures - I said so in my original comment. - Yes people protested, which was understandable and healthy, and allowed by governments/police. - Yes sometimes police were heavy handed in enforcing the laws - where it went too far it was widely shared on social and mainstream media and condemned by pretty much everyone. But these cases were isolated. - The measures taken in the NT to quarantine cases were done because that territory is home to some of the most vulnerable people on earth in terms of pre-existing health conditions, education/language and access to medical care and information; in short, it was done to protect the most vulnerable members of the indigenous population from severe illness and premature death. You couldn’t possibly think of anything more opposite to Nazism if you tried. The thing about being an adult is that you learn that government policies/measures shouldn’t be measured against some idealistic, imagined alternate reality, but against the realistic next-worst scenario. That’s the whole reason I outgrew my belief in simplistic socialist policies in my late 20s, which most people do, of course. To me one of the greatest revelations of the pandemic is that libertarians are just as liable to succumb to idealistic fantasies as socialists have historically been. The standard refrain has been that governments should “protect the vulnerable” while letting everyone else live totally freely - but without suggesting a workable plan for how this actually could be achieved, particularly when it’s not obvious in advance, who is/isn’t vulnerable. Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism. If I’ve misrepresented you, please explain how. If not, please be less euphemistic in how you’re conveying the kind of outcome you’d prefer to see of the pandemic in Australia, given that the ultimate actual outcome has been a remarkably low fatality rate by world standards (1/7 per-capita even of the much vaunted Sweden), and a social/political order now largely back to what it was beforehand.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Good to know where you're coming from and, yes, I remember you well. Nice to chat again. >Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism. > If I've misrepresented you, please explain how. Yes, this is a misrepresentation (though I know you don't do it maliciously), and I'll be happy to explain. The original article posted here beautifully illustrates this process as well. The article also notes that the gas-lighting and trivialization of objections to this process as "alarmist" is a present feature. The process that a society undergoes in order to eventually commit atrocities against some scapegoated people is well-known and it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass to outcome-based management which focuses on a single-minded definition of success. This single-metric management is a finely-tuned technique that is favored by officials acting against the best interests of the people as a whole to erode and impede basic human rights. In this process, the ends always justify the means. The only way this process is successful is if the despots in question are able to manipulate enough of the people via their base instincts and the most useful of instincts in propaganda is fear. Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear. Girard described this entire process perfectly (as does OP's original article). We saw this same process occur in the US after 9/11, where the fear and anger in response to those attacks led our country into a 20 year military campaign of the most irrational nature and one which ended in total failure. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, trillions of dollars were wasted, and thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured with no regard to human rights or due process of law. I watched with dismay as people who described themselves as patriots and "strong Constitutionalists" threw any notion of rights and due process out the window in the name of "getting those terrorists." Even the definition of terrorist became quite vague ("he looked like one"), and the long-term societal effects in America and around the world remain with us to this day and they will likely never go away. So am I saying that those "patriots" were Nazis or that the post-9/11 response in America is the same as Nazism? No, it's not about the characteristics of an ideology rooted in a specific milieu. I'm saying that Nazism itself was of the same Category / Type of all collectivist and coercive behavior and it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management. You lose the forest for the trees and a whole bunch of civilizational progress toward human freedom along the way. I probably have a few years even on you and, as such, am well acquainted with the real world. The older I get, the more I can see that if we abandon high-minded ideals and indulge our base passions we are left only with lizard brains and that this process of totalitarian control is designed with that exact outcome in mind. My original statement in response to the parent of this thread / context was simply an opportunity for self-reflection. How did we all respond to people on the outside of the establishment narrative, who had differing beliefs? Did we support their freedom of choice and basic human rights or did we look the other way when they lost their jobs or businesses, support forced vaccinations (violence), gloss over the abuses of law enforcement, etc. It's not a personal accusation, it's a simple question and one that we have to answer both as individuals and as a society. The ideology, the regime, the government officials, etc. are ultimately irrelevant because all of that depends on the cooperation of the ordinary people, including you and me. But those same choices then were the same choices faced by the Germans in WWII, regardless of the specifics of the ideology in question. The transformation of the people that I witnessed in two short years was disturbing to say the least.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

Good to know where you're coming from and, yes, I remember you well. Nice to chat again. >Let’s be clear: your phrase “societal-level adoption of coercive actions and narratives in the name of serving the greater good” is a high-minded way of saying that the virus should have just been allowed to spread, regardless of the cost in human lives, and that to do otherwise is essentially the same as Nazism. > If I've misrepresented you, please explain how. Yes, this is a misrepresentation (though I know you don't do it maliciously), and I'll be happy to explain. The original article posted here beautifully illustrates this process as well. The article also notes that the gas-lighting and trivialization of objections to this process as "alarmist" is a present feature. The process that a society undergoes in order to eventually commit atrocities against some scapegoated people is well-known and it is dependent on the people within a nation being willing to subvert their ordinary moral compass to outcome-based management which focuses on a single-minded definition of success. This single-metric management is a finely-tuned technique that is favored by officials acting against the best interests of the people as a whole to erode and impede basic human rights. In this process, the ends always justify the means. The only way this process is successful is if the despots in question are able to manipulate enough of the people via their base instincts and the most useful of instincts in propaganda is fear. Fear of the other, fear of loss, fear of sickness or death, fear of economic collapse, there are many ways to exploit the human mind using fear. Girard described this entire process perfectly (as does OP's original article). We saw this same process occur in the US after 9/11, where the fear and anger in response to those attacks led our country into a 20 year military campaign of the most irrational nature and one which ended in total failure. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, trillions of dollars were wasted, and thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured with no regard to human rights or due process of law. I watched with dismay as people who described themselves as patriots and "strong Constitutionalists" threw any notion of rights and due process out the window in the name of "getting those terrorists." Even the definition of terrorist became quite vague ("he looked like one"), and the long-term societal effects in America and around the world remain with us to this day and they will likely never go away. So am I saying that those "patriots" were Nazis or that the post-9/11 response in America is the same as Nazism? No, it's not about the characteristics of an ideology rooted in a specific milieu. I'm saying that Nazism itself was of the same Category / Type of all collectivist and coercive behavior and it is entirely dependent on the lizard brain, emotions over reason, and a focus on single-metric management. You lose the forest for the trees and a whole bunch of civilizational progress toward human freedom along the way. I probably have a few years even on you and, as such, am well acquainted with the real world. The older I get, the more I can see that if we abandon high-minded ideals and indulge our base passions we are left only with lizard brains and that this process of totalitarian control is designed with that exact outcome in mind. My original statement in response to the parent of this thread / context was simply an opportunity for self-reflection. How did we all respond to people on the outside of the establishment narrative, who had differing beliefs? Did we support their freedom of choice and basic human rights or did we look the other way when they lost their jobs or businesses, support forced vaccinations (violence), gloss over the abuses of law enforcement, etc. It's not a personal accusation, it's a simple question and one that we have to answer both as individuals and as a society. The ideology, the regime, the government officials, etc. are ultimately irrelevant because all of that depends on the cooperation of the ordinary people, including you and me. But those same choices then were the same choices faced by the Germans in WWII, regardless of the specifics of the ideology in question. The transformation of the people that I witnessed in two short years was disturbing to say the least.