09-06-2023, 01:24 PM
(09-06-2023, 07:16 AM)hollodero Wrote: That is a fair point, and I for one fall on the side that the protests should not have been allowed. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that this would have been a terrible and possibly near impossible decision to make, as in throwing a torch into a powder keg. I wouldn't know how I could have handled that situation in accordance with my beliefs on the sense of social distancing rules.
I have first hand knowledge of how angry people would have been, trust me.
But KG raises an interesting point below, what if the virus had a 20% lethality rate, would the protests have still been allowed? Once you answer that then revisit the point I made; either the virus wasn't as deadly as they claimed, and they knew it, or they didn't know and let people expose themselves in the thousands. Given the nature of things, and information that we've subsequently become privy to, I think the former is by far the most likely.Quote:Also, I don't know the exact US narrative, but here the masking and social distancing rules weren't so much meant to extinguish the virus, but to slow down the spread to not overwhelm hospitals. Which nearly happened anyway. For that reason alone, I believed some restrictions made a lot of sense - up to a point. When the more harmless variant became prevalent, the lockdowns got harder to justify.
That was the stated goal here as well, but it also got mixed in with "two weeks to flatten the curve". There was little to no transparency and the more information we get the more we realized we were not always being told the truth. Sometimes out of ignorance, but sometimes deliberately.
Quote:Not to mention some measures always were exaggerated. On the one side, I understood why caution with a yet unknown virus seems like the sensible route to go. But closing down schools or disallowing access to hospital patients no matter if there's a negative covid test, things of that nature, always were questionable. I remember your story about that and heard some similar ones, and those were some terrible und unnecessary restrictions. I will, however, still defend the earlier lockdown decisions in principle. Pretty much the whole world agreed on them.
Yeah, I don't think I'll ever not be angry about that, which was only exacerbated when I saw the huge George Floyd funeral. Apparently that was fine, but not an old man sitting on his wife of 50+ years deathbed.
(09-06-2023, 10:11 AM)KillerGoose Wrote: Just to push further on one particular topic, do you think personal freedom has a limit where you would be ok with a temporary loss of freedom? What if COVID had a 25% mortality rate instead of <1%? If not there, is there any level of mortality where you would be okay to comply with an enforced mandate to lock down/vaccinate/wear PPE etc.? I don't mean this as a "gotcha", just genuine curiosity.
People first went into the whole lockdown willingly, and gave the government a lot of leeway and benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, that was abused, such as Newsome's unmasked dinner for donors, and I think a sizeable percentage of our population will not trust the government on this type of issue again. It would take a bodies stacked in the streets situation for many at this point.
