They Thought They Were Free (1955)

> I would also remind the short of memory that during covid, the states with the most draconian restrictions were mostly left-leaning, and many were loathe to give up that control.

...

Some exerts from 3 different studies but you may find more if you want.

> This suggests that red states faced a more pronounced impact from COVID-19, experiencing elevated mortality rates compared to their blue counterparts.

> Red states had higher COVID-19 infection rates and deaths in 2021 compared to blue states.

> A study in June published in Health Affairs similarly found that counties with a Republican majority had a greater share of Covid deaths through October 2021, relative to majority-Democratic counties. The Yale researchers behind the new working paper say vaccine hesitancy among Republicans may be the biggest culprit.

There is a different between draconian restriction that saved lives, vs "FREEDOM" that resulted in more people dying but hey, they did not need a vaccine or mask. I hope it was worth it for those that had family *unnecessarily* die because of their own, or others "FREEDOM".

I think you confuse dictatorships with measures to help a to prevent deaths. Hey, i remember the "dictatorship" of required seatbelts outcry's. And yet, how many lives have been saved.

There is a difference between people crying how their rights are removed, vs the general good of the population. Being selfish in a society does not make you a freedom proponent, but just a selfish person. If people want to live with all the freedoms in the world, great, go live in some mountain somewhere where you have no contact with others. But the moment you have a semblance of society, there will be more and more pressure to prevent individual actions from harming others. If you want to shoot your guns out in the open like Rambo when your a individual and do not harm to others, fine, have fun. But if your shooting your guns in any society structure where you have neighbors or people around, and you actions have consequences to those around, you will always have some form of governance that will "restrict" your freedom, as now your part of a society.

The issue become dangerous when that governance is MISUSED by those that pass laws and restrictions, that are not for the global good but for their own financial or power benefits. And i feel that people misunderstand the difference between what a social governance is and a autocracy governance.

They're using trans people's participation in sports (once uncontroversial) as a wedge to drive in the larger wedge of trans existence.

They can do this because, intuitively, many people think there's an advantage to be had. If there were such advantages, then we'd have to consider the thorny topic of what constitutes an "unfair" advantage, and whether the social implications of excluding a marginalised population outweigh the (perhaps disproportionate) impact of yada yada. But we don't have to consider any of this, because scientific research suggests trans women do not have such advantages over cis women: medical transition does not lead to a body configuration optimised for sports. Quoth, for instance, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chest.2025.04.004:

> This study highlights substantial ventilatory inefficiencies in transgender women, likely associated with gender-affirming hormone therapy

This whole moral panic is an artificially-constructed wedge issue: they found something persuasive, and (by presenting trans people as something dangerous and new) side-stepped the need for evidence of harm, and positioned their reactionary bans as conservative. I think, when arguing about this topic, more attention needs to be paid to the fact that feminising hormone therapy (as a treatment for trans women) is older than insulin (as a treatment for diabetics). Any harmful consequences of trans existence (resp. participation in sports, etc) already happened, and nobody alive noticed.

history does not repeat itself it rhymes

Sort of pertinent for any boiling the frog or salami tactics situation where something profoundly negative is gradually introduced into society so as not to raise alarm.

> Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan

Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...

Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.

There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.