211–220 of 363 posts
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This utopian view of the EU predates COVID. I’m not sure where it comes from.
To a thirsty man in the desert, a muddy puddle is an oasis.
The idea that Europe is somehow much less racist than the US, for instance, is laughable.
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People aren't asking for authoritarian restrictions. People have been asking for common-sense coordinated and effective measures that we can all rally around (like wearing masks). Instead we have ineffective politically driven responses marked by indecision and incompetence. People don't want lockdowns, but we recognise that because our containment measures have failed, we have no choice but to shut things. If you do…
The idea that there's some set of coordinated post-lockdown measures that will prevent the need for further lockdowns strikes me as unrealistic. Every country I'm familiar with that attempted to control the pandemic with lockdowns has had to reimpose them at least once.
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I'd argue there's no direct correlation. There are societies with lesser regard for rationality doing just fine too. Several countries not in "the path of the storm" can claim credit for anything they did and didn't do as having stopped covid to the point of superstition. Id credit Germans' preference of beer just as much as their February/March response or their penchant for rationality. It's a form of collective su…
> were the US, Italy, and other more severely affected countries already major travel hubs for people coming from early affected regions? That only played a role very early on, at the beginning of the pandemic, when imported cases drove spread of the virus. As the pandemic goes on, community spread becomes the dominant factor, so policies that affect transmission can have a huge effect. The most dramatic example of t…
In this forum, right here on HN, people routinely espouse desire for more authoritarian restrictions. People gleefully discuss Sweden and almost openly hope that their lockdown-free plan fails. The article makes it sound as if the erosion of democracy is coming from the top. In the USA, it’s coming from the bottom. It’s coming from everyday citizens.
I agree with you completely. I get regularly downvoted here for promoting free speech and denouncing all forms of web censorship. Websites and their obscure “Terms of Service” and “Community Guidelines” are eroding those rights and should be fully compliant with the first amendment if operating in the United States, similar to how websites operating in the EU must comply with the GDPR. I forgot how the United States…
This makes me think you misunderstand the first amendment. It concerns freedom of expression from government interference. Free amplification on private platforms is not covered.
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> People aren't asking for authoritarian restrictions. People have been asking for common-sense coordinated and effective measures that we can all rally around (like wearing masks). It’s hard to find persistent daylight between those two things. (For the record, I wear masks outside and in grocery stores, which are the only shops I go to. I find this at least 75% common sense.) When it comes time though to force some…
When the vast majority of people agree that we should do something reasonable for the common good and you disagree loudly while flailing your arms about, then it doesn't make you a defender of liberty, it makes you an obnoxious moron.
How many will die if every human alive today gets Covid-19, and will those who survive be able to repopulate the Earth, or will the percentage lost be a barley noticeable blip when individuals in the year 3000 look at the chart of human population growth from the dawn of humanity to their current age, assuming our species survives that long? If a blip, this has all been much ado about nothing.
If in the grand scheme of things, 6 million deaths becomes a blip, will the holocaust have been much ado about nothing?
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Sure. But China, arguably not much of a democracy did just fine. So the whole link between the pandemic and political systems is mostly nonsense, the countries where the impact is least are simply the ones that reacted fastest and most decisive. Everybody else is playing catch-up and they may have to substantially pause their 'freedoms' and 'democratic rights' to get through to the other side. This is a simple result…
So you believe in information that Chinese communist party is providing. A totalitarian regime with mass violation of human rights?! I love China and Chinese people but people suffer a lot under the rule of CCP. They are faking their financial data and they are faking their COVID data as well.
From the article, it sounds like our response to the pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights. The virus is not agentic, and what they describe are intentional acts by human beings.
This has been a consistent theme to responses to major crisis in US has faced in my lifetime - every time, after the crisis the situation is worse than it was before the crisis. Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID. The scars from the first two really should have healed a long time ago. It'll be a pretty dire future if the COVID response…
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> People have been asking for common-sense coordinated and effective measures that we can all rally around (like wearing masks). Instead -- We're already doing this. > because our containment measures have failed, we have no choice but to shut things. Until when? The shutdowns were supposed to be about making sure that hospitals have time to prepare, research has time to be done, society has time to adapt. This has a…
>We're already doing this. Really? Because all the video's I've seen indicate politicians of a certain political persuasion (and their family members) doing the utmost to avoid wearing masks in situations that they should have known better. >Until when? The shutdowns were supposed to be about making sure that hospitals have time to prepare, research has time to be done, society has time to adapt. This has already tak…
But this is exactly the mindset that I'd characterize as an erosion of "respect for human rights". When the government proposes extraordinary restrictions, it's their responsibility to clearly define how long the restrictions need to last. Answers like "until it's safe" or "stop building this into a strawman" should not satisfy us, because the entire principle of human rights is that governments can't be trusted with such unlimited mandates.
(I should note to be fair that many governments have indeed limited their mandate, saying that they're going to remove all the restrictions once a vaccine is widely available. I don't necessarily agree with that from a policy perspective, but it's much better than an indefinite commitment to stop the disease from spreading.)
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Well put. There was a book from ages ago called The Ugly American which caused a big stir in US political circles because of the way it decried US foreign policy. It contrasted the US approach (dinner parties in the Embassy) withe the Russians - who learned the local languages, respected local cultural nuances and customs, and taught locals how to more effectively till their lands. That contrast caused a huge stir in…
There are plenty of religious folks who would debate the bit about Russians (I presume you’re referring to soviet Russia) respecting local culture. Cult (worship) is the root of culture, and the soviets were not well known for religious freedom. Edit: not a defense of US foreign policy, which has been abysmal. Just pointing out that the track record is abysmal across the board.
"cult" is indeed a substring of "culture", but the etymology is likely the other way around. both come from the latin verb "colo", which concretely means something like "till" or "care for" (in the sense of agriculture). it's used more abstractly to mean "worship", but this likely comes from the idea of caring for / tending to an actual effigy or temple of a deity.