About 60,000,000 people die every year, which is absolutely fine. Everybody who’s alive today will eventually die. Everybody who’s born in the future will also die. Everybody who gets to live will also get sick occasionally. Most of them will eventually get so sick that they can’t continue living.
Nothing can be done to prevent this. It is just a fundamental fact of life. If you believe that it is the governments duty to extend lifespans and prevent illness at literally any cost, then there is literally no level of tyranny that you won’t tolerate. Why should you be free to choose your own diet? Why should you be free to choose for yourself how much you want to exercise? More people die every year from making those choices badly than anything else. Why should you be allowed to leave your house for anything except the most essential purposes? The outside world has so many things that are liable to kill you.
“Oh but x number of people will die” is just a fear based argument that dismisses all other considerations. 100% of people will die. If you believe liberty is important on any level, then you would believe people should generally be able to decide for themselves what risks they want to take with their lives. If you believe in democracy on any level then people should certainly be free to discuss what risk decisions they should be denied by the government making them on their behalf.
The fact that we’re debating whether we should be allowed to leave our houses is somewhat shocking. The fact a significant number of people believe we shouldn’t even be allowed to discuss this is a more dystopian reality than I could have previously imagined.
> If you believe that it is the governments duty to extend lifespans and prevent illness at literally any cost
I do not. The cost of fast and strict lockdowns is very minimal. It's when you wait to enact a proper lockdown that it becomes very very expensive, because it suddenly takes six months to finish instead of six days.
> More people die every year from making those choices [diet, exercise] badly than anything else.
Yep, which is most countries tax things like sugar more heavily than they do vegetables, and why your health insurance is cheaper if you're in good physical health. We already have restrictions to incentivise good habits there.
> If you believe liberty is important on any level, then you would believe people should generally be able to decide for themselves what risks they want to take with their lives.
I'm fine with people deciding what risks they want to take with their own lives, I'm not fine with them deciding what risks they want to take with the lives of anyone who happens to come into contact with them.
> And by the way the cost is not just economical but also social, pedagogical (remote learning is still in a joke stage), psychological, sentimental (like marrying without proper event) and those are hard to quantify yet are the salt of human life.
I think you've misunderstood my comment. All of these costs are significantly greater if you do not enact a fast and strict lockdown.
If you lock down at a single digit case count, you can be out and free with no restrictions by the end of the week, as the virus can be quickly eradicated in those conditions. The costs of that are very minor, and mostly amount to annoyances in rescheduling things. I've gone through this twice. It's not ideal, but it's pretty easy to cope with.
If you wait for cases to balloon to the tens of thousands, you will have to outright cancel events instead of rescheduling them, lest you want your wedding guests to die from preventable illnesses. Those are the kind of extremely heavy social costs you're describing, and I 100% agree that avoiding them is extremely important.
You might not believe that the government must preserve life at any cost, but that is the only argument you have put forward. People will die, so it must be illegal to go outside. You might actually have a more nuanced perspective on why this particular risk warrants the criminalization of going outside (or you might not), but you haven’t made any attempt to express that. But if you chose to, then surely somebody with a different perspective to you should equally be allowed to express their opinion? I honestly can’t think of a more important issue facing society today, and even if your perspective isn’t the one being suppressed, you must think that it’s harmful to disallow debate on the topic?
I also think that the argument you’re putting forward here shows close to zero regard for the welfare of other people. Perhaps the lockdowns are inexpensive to you, but they are life-changingly devastating to others. Perhaps you have a comfortable living arrangement, and the ability to work from home. Perhaps you haven’t had to attend a parents funeral over FaceTime. Perhaps you haven’t lost your career. Perhaps you haven’t been confined to a dormitory for months on end. Perhaps you haven’t been stuck at home with a domestic abuser. Perhaps you haven’t had to liquidate your business. Perhaps you haven’t been driven to suicide by having your entire life taken away. But many people have. Surely we must be allowed to debate the indiscriminate costs of the measures you demand to increase your own personal safety.
Your argument for controlling others to protect your own safety can also be extended without limit. Most of the things that can kill you outside are the decisions of other people. Why should they be allowed out for non-essential purposes when they are clearly imperilling you for their own leisure? I’m going to cook dinner tonight, why should I be allowed to do that when I might burn my house down, and your house too, killing both of us and our entire families? Surely some laws are necessary, but surely we must be entitled to debate them to figure out which ones are reasonable.
> I also think that the argument you’re putting forward here shows close to zero regard for the welfare of other people. Perhaps the lockdowns are inexpensive to you, but they are life-changingly devastating to others.
So let's minimise how devastating they are by doing them hard and early, so that they don't end up lasting for months.
Or is your proposed alternative not doing them at all? Because dying is a hell of a lot more devastating than a lockdown is.
> Perhaps you haven’t had to attend a parents funeral over FaceTime.
Letting thousands more parents die so that someone can attend a funeral seems rather counter-productive.
> Perhaps you haven’t been stuck at home with a domestic abuser.
Even the harshest lockdowns I'm aware of have explicitly allowed for accommodations in these types of situations, and I've never seen a single person arguing that they shouldn't.
> Perhaps you haven’t been driven to suicide by having your entire life taken away. But many people have.
Bullshit. Here's a direct quote from the AIHW:
"Since 2020, suicide registers in Victoria and New South Wales have regularly published data on suspected deaths by suicide in 2019, 2020 and 2021. The Suicide in Queensland: Annual Report 2020 (Leske et al. 2020) included data on suspected deaths by suicide from January 2015 to July 2020. In all cases there is no evidence of any increase in 2020 or 2021 relative to previous years."
This is an extremely common blatant lie perpetuated by the exact kind of disinformation merchants this thread is about. COVID-19 related restrictions and lockdowns have had no effect on suicide rates.
> Surely some laws are necessary, but surely we must be entitled to debate them to figure out which ones are reasonable.
You're absolutely entitled to debate them - you're doing that right here. No-one's getting banned for posting "I think this lockdown is unnecessary". They're getting banned for spreading false information and advocating for people to actively break said laws, creating major health risks in the process.
Then discussion of any form of civil disobedience should be banned. All of it is by nature illegal. A sit in is a mass trespassing event. A march illegally shuts down traffic and critical infrastructure.
Having a loose association with groups that promote civil disobedience, or even directly promoting it is clearly not the reason that Facebook is banning these accounts. Because Facebook doesn’t do this with any other cause that promotes or associates with the promoters of civil disobedience (in democratic jurisdictions at least).
You also can’t make the case that civil disobedience during the pandemic is disallowed. Because the promotion of civil disobedience and mass gatherings was very clearly allowed, depending on the cause that was being promoted.
I also find the suggestion that one of the least trusted companies in the world should be entrusted with the authority to police “false information” to be completely laughable. Your own interpretation of what constitutes “false information” is clearly rather inadequate. I made the claim that people who would not have otherwise committed suicide did as a result of the lockdown. Something I know for a fact to be true. Your claim is that this is not true because you claim that the total number of suicides hasn’t changed. Which, even if true, doesn’t refute my point in any way. Which demonstrates perfectly why preserving democratic principles is so important.
> About 60,000,000 people die every year, which is absolutely fine
Which is about half the japanese population. Or are we comparing apples to jetskis here?
There is more to death than numbers. 16.000 genocidal industrialized slaughterings or 16.000 targeted kindergarden assassinations are certainly something a free society cannot tolerate, while 16.000 dying of old age is something a free society has to tolerate because it is part of nature.
Now that we are clear what kind of deaths a free society has incentives to prevent for sure (genocides, assassinations) we can move on into murkier territory: Preventable pandemic deseases. Note the pandemic in there, it is the thing that makes the difference between "you lead an unhealthy lifestyle and now it comes back to haunt you" and "you did everything right, but your neighbour caughed in your face today". Being in a pandemic situation where everybody can potentially become another ones killer is a delicate situation for any form of society, but especially for a free one. But compared to the times of the black death it is much, much easier if you know what is killing you, how it is doing it and how to prevent people from getting it, either by organisational changes (lockdowns, mask mandates, home office) and/or by medical means (vaccinations).
Now any free society usually also values life itself. Preventable deaths are bad. Preventable pandemic death is worse, because it is not a fixed number ("x people get struck by lightning a year"), but a partially exponentially developing one.
I think it is totally rational for any kind of free society to:
- do more to avoid preventable death than unpreventable death (the easier this prevention is the bigger the moral duty to do sth)
- do more to avoid preventable pandemic death than preventable non-pandemic death (because logistic function)
The easier and the less side effects this prevention has the more moral mandate there is to do it.
Of course measures can go over the top as well. Politicians/corporations can abuse the situation to extend their powers and these are legitimate concerns.
Sadly nowadays they are filled with very un-nuanced, self-lying fundamentalist people ("My freedom to not wear a mask is more important than your freedom not to die") that are quite frankly right now the reason why this pandemic is still rolling.
It is hard to form reasonable criticism in companionship of people who do as if a piece of cloth in front of their mouth is the most fundamental breach of human rights ever.
> Sadly nowadays they are filled with very un-nuanced, self-lying fundamentalist people ("My freedom to not wear a mask is more important than your freedom not to die") that are quite frankly right now the reason why this pandemic is still rolling.
“X number of people will die” is an equally un-nuanced argument, and in the comment I was replying to above, it was the entirety of the argument they put forward.
It is possible to have a nuanced and properly considered discussion or debate about the intricacies of this topic. But on Facebook, you’re only allowed to do this if your perspective is on the list of approved perspectives. It’s the same for a lot of other social media outlets. Even if you don’t necessarily get banned, the idiots who are only capable of seeing black and white tend to do their best to drown out any opinions they don’t like.
Nothing can be done to prevent this. It is just a fundamental fact of life. If you believe that it is the governments duty to extend lifespans and prevent illness at literally any cost, then there is literally no level of tyranny that you won’t tolerate. Why should you be free to choose your own diet? Why should you be free to choose for yourself how much you want to exercise? More people die every year from making those choices badly than anything else. Why should you be allowed to leave your house for anything except the most essential purposes? The outside world has so many things that are liable to kill you.
“Oh but x number of people will die” is just a fear based argument that dismisses all other considerations. 100% of people will die. If you believe liberty is important on any level, then you would believe people should generally be able to decide for themselves what risks they want to take with their lives. If you believe in democracy on any level then people should certainly be free to discuss what risk decisions they should be denied by the government making them on their behalf.
The fact that we’re debating whether we should be allowed to leave our houses is somewhat shocking. The fact a significant number of people believe we shouldn’t even be allowed to discuss this is a more dystopian reality than I could have previously imagined.