3 ms·

This presumes you’re smart enough to make good policy choices absent honest debate and that you can enact policies effectively without public buy-in through aut

This presumes you’re smart enough to make good policy choices absent honest debate and that you can enact policies effectively without public buy-in through authoritarian means. Both assumptions are untrue — and we’re only beginning to see the consequences of the institutional failures. Eg, why does excess death remain high in Western Europe but not Eastern Europe? — why is only Eastern Europe showing the decline in mortality we’d normally see after a pandemic? Policy choices — based on lies, manipulation, and force.

didibus 3y ago
Policies are shaped through a democratic process where leaders, elected by all of us, make choices based on sometimes confidential info. Their powers are balanced, by a representative republic, with laws and regular check-ins. Disagree? Vote 'em out! We assume that we elected smart officials, that will engage in honest debates, and discuss with experts first. Some policies may not vibe with you, but others are on board. It's not all about science; decisions factor in global stuff, potential chaos, and even sanitizer-in-veins scenarios. It's not based on lies, manipulation and force, it's based on the rules of a democratic, representative, republic.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  A few points: 1. Not restricting communication is a law, that they violated repeatedly in this process. 2. Democratic process doesn’t consist purely of elections, but a continuous public debate for the purposes of reaching communal consensus and informing representatives of our collective will — and that fundamental democratic process was subverted. 3. This absolutely was done with lies (eg, Pfizer never tested for preventing transmission and public health officials outright lied), manipulation (eg, preventing scientific experts from communicating their views with the public through government censorship), and force (eg, mandates that coerced people to take experimental medical treatments in violation of the Nuremberg standards). There have always been some people who happily cooperate with authoritarians subverting liberal society — that they did so now tells us nothing. We’re only beginning to see the reckoning for those failures.
  - didibus 3y ago
    > This absolutely was done with lies (eg, Pfizer never tested for preventing transmission and public health officials outright lied), manipulation (eg, preventing scientific experts from communicating their views with the public through government censorship), and force (eg, mandates that coerced people to take experimental medical treatments in violation of the Nuremberg standards) I'm willing to accept some of this if you show me proof. Who exactly lied, where did they lie, what official source shows a lie? What scientific expert was prevented from communicating their views by the government? Where were any treatment experimental, that had not gone through the standard set of protocols that all treatment goes through?
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      1. Masks, that vaccines would prevent transmission, etc. This has been testified to in Congress. 2. Robert Malone had his views censored on social media by the government, along with other examples from the Twitter Files — which outline government requests to censor on the topic of COVID. 3. The vaccines are experimental and went through an emergency use approval — despite existing treatments like monoclonal antibodies. They didn’t have standard testing for pregnancy effects and didn’t have proper testing for boosters.

didibus 3y ago

Policies are shaped through a democratic process where leaders, elected by all of us, make choices based on sometimes confidential info. Their powers are balanced, by a representative republic, with laws and regular check-ins. Disagree? Vote 'em out! We assume that we elected smart officials, that will engage in honest debates, and discuss with experts first. Some policies may not vibe with you, but others are on board. It's not all about science; decisions factor in global stuff, potential chaos, and even sanitizer-in-veins scenarios. It's not based on lies, manipulation and force, it's based on the rules of a democratic, representative, republic.

zmgsabst 3y ago
A few points: 1. Not restricting communication is a law, that they violated repeatedly in this process. 2. Democratic process doesn’t consist purely of elections, but a continuous public debate for the purposes of reaching communal consensus and informing representatives of our collective will — and that fundamental democratic process was subverted. 3. This absolutely was done with lies (eg, Pfizer never tested for preventing transmission and public health officials outright lied), manipulation (eg, preventing scientific experts from communicating their views with the public through government censorship), and force (eg, mandates that coerced people to take experimental medical treatments in violation of the Nuremberg standards). There have always been some people who happily cooperate with authoritarians subverting liberal society — that they did so now tells us nothing. We’re only beginning to see the reckoning for those failures.
- didibus 3y ago
  > This absolutely was done with lies (eg, Pfizer never tested for preventing transmission and public health officials outright lied), manipulation (eg, preventing scientific experts from communicating their views with the public through government censorship), and force (eg, mandates that coerced people to take experimental medical treatments in violation of the Nuremberg standards) I'm willing to accept some of this if you show me proof. Who exactly lied, where did they lie, what official source shows a lie? What scientific expert was prevented from communicating their views by the government? Where were any treatment experimental, that had not gone through the standard set of protocols that all treatment goes through?
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    1. Masks, that vaccines would prevent transmission, etc. This has been testified to in Congress. 2. Robert Malone had his views censored on social media by the government, along with other examples from the Twitter Files — which outline government requests to censor on the topic of COVID. 3. The vaccines are experimental and went through an emergency use approval — despite existing treatments like monoclonal antibodies. They didn’t have standard testing for pregnancy effects and didn’t have proper testing for boosters.