3 ms·

They were coerced by the state: they issued mandates which required vaccination to engage in normal rights. That’s the literal definition of coercion. I think

They were coerced by the state: they issued mandates which required vaccination to engage in normal rights. That’s the literal definition of coercion. I think it’s interesting how many people deny that — almost as if you know what was done is morally repugnant.

nkrisc 2y ago
Viruses are not concerned with ethics and morals.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  Okay — but we have more concerns than a single virus. It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results. Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    And some day there may be another epidemic for which we optimize for freedom, and after which there will be no human left to enjoy the freedom (or those left will be too busy surviving to worry about things such as “freedom”). It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight. Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      You say that as if the recommendations for freedom weren’t based on the initial medical data. But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened. That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.
    - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
      > Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight. We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  > Viruses are not concerned with ethics and morals. Good thing we aren’t viruses and have intelligence and the ability to step back and think through our actions. There is more to life than exactly one specific myopic focus on a virus. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to believe that the only problem humans can solve for is an exactly one single virus to the exclusion of literally everything else. Massive, massive amounts of privilege to think that way, in fact.

nkrisc 2y ago

Viruses are not concerned with ethics and morals.

zmgsabst 2y ago
Okay — but we have more concerns than a single virus. It’s entirely possible to engage in net-negative behaviors because you fixate on a singular goal — a human version of the “paperclip optimizer”: we became “COVID optimizers” and produced suboptimal results. Ethics and morals are time-honed heuristics to avoid those failures. “Freedom” is the heuristic that distributed risk assessment and planning out perform centralized versions — and we forgot that in our panic.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  And some day there may be another epidemic for which we optimize for freedom, and after which there will be no human left to enjoy the freedom (or those left will be too busy surviving to worry about things such as “freedom”). It is fortunate that the COVID-19 pandemic did not rise to that level. Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight. Or some other catastrophe that threatens us. My point is that natural things do not care for artificial concepts such as “freedoms” and “rights” and “morality”.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    You say that as if the recommendations for freedom weren’t based on the initial medical data. But they were and you’re inventing a false dichotomy whereby we had to engage in totalitarianism contrary to evidence of COVID’s deadliness or some hypothetical infinite bad might have happened. That’s nothing but bullshit, from somebody who was wrong.
  - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
    > Maybe it couldn’t have, but that’s easier to say with the benefit of hindsight. We knew within two weeks of most major shutdowns that Covid wasn’t even close to as bad as predicted by the Imperial College. Society decided to completely ignore that data and instead doubled down on its hysteria for more than three years.
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
> Viruses are not concerned with ethics and morals. Good thing we aren’t viruses and have intelligence and the ability to step back and think through our actions. There is more to life than exactly one specific myopic focus on a virus. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to believe that the only problem humans can solve for is an exactly one single virus to the exclusion of literally everything else. Massive, massive amounts of privilege to think that way, in fact.