And this is why libertarian/pro-liberty types can’t get political traction to share their otherwise good ideas. The instant government takes action to help someone - even when justified by a public emergency - too many of them start hysterically shrieking that the whole thing is just a ruse by Statists (!!!) to control everyone and eliminate all the freedoms.
They discredit themselves - and sadly the other good ideas - with this juvenile persecution complex with regular people, who roll their eyes at the overly-dramatic nonsense and decide “I’ll never vote for one of these wingnuts.”
Doesnt make it any smarter to exercise it by telling a cop to fuck off though, does it?
Like just because “I Got My Rights!” doesn’t mean I have to exercise them all of the time, or I shouldn’t be judicious about how.
Why are all of the “I got my rights” and “But the constutushin!” crowd so unfamiliar with the laws regarding quarantine (linked above) and so woefully unconcerned with any responsibilities that accompany these rights?
They are the ones who ruin any chance for libertarian policy. And unfortunately, IMO, the ones too stupid or too selfish to survive in a libertarian-light society number in the tens of millions and are the reason heavy govt oversight is needed… But I digress.
It’s weird that the surrealness of this whole thing has mostly worn off. I’m pretty excited that state forests open back up next week so I can get some more skiing in!
It’s volcano season here in the PNW. Hood, Adams, St Helens, Ranier, Baker. All hold good corn snow into late June/July and the views are pretty goddamn spectacular.
Once out of the parking areas, it gets real easy to social distance real quick haha.
And so please describe to me the current, day to day state of your freedoms since WWII, when we imprisoned Japanese-Americans as a wartime measure, the nadir of government action on civil liberties. If you’re right about this inevitable slippery slope, you should have been born into a prison. How’s it going?
This is not how I see it. I think it is stupid (in America) to have to show papers when you are out of the house. You should be able to go out of the house for whatever reason. However, businesses are the purview of public health officers, and there is a centuries long series of precedents for regulation of business and person during pandemics. Regulation of businesses is not a violation of anything.
On the other hand, when someone says they’re not going to do anything at all for consideration of another person, I think that IS selfish.
What’s the saying? “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”? Basically you can do whatever you want as long as you’re not harming another person, right?
Well, in this case social distancing is the effective equivalent of “the nose”. You do NOT have a right to voluntarily infect someone with a potentially deadly pathogen. Masks and distance is the effective way of saying “here’s where your likelihood to hurt someone is”. Go out? Cool. Shop? Great. I don’t support criminal proceedings for people who are out and about unless they’re doing the equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater–which is what a couple people filming themselves coughing all over thousands of dollars of food in stores, or on police officers, have done. It’s also what people do when they KNOW they’re positive and they go out to fly on a plane. Deliberate disregard for another person’s welfare and/or filming yourself doing things that can only be regarded as deliberate disregard should be handled hard. Outside of that, I don’t believe criminal actions should result.
HOWEVER, because a) it is in fact the government’s purview to regulate business actions and b) a pandemic is a public healthcare emergency with old precedents… including the USA…I don’t believe someone is correct to bitch about Walmart requiring them to wear a mask, or walk in 1 direction.
And FYI, the whole “don’t hurt feelings thing” has already been happening, though I’m sure you’re aware of it.
And - AND - you don’t see businesses sharing this anti-government attitude. Every business I know of, large and small, is asking for government intervention of some kind to help with this emergency. Are all these businesses de facto socialists or statists? Of course not.
I’d wager to say none of them are. We all want the ability to follow our own destiny. That’s different from recognizing that there are certain things the government is explicitly directed to do and that we would really like to have done (namely, provide for the public welfare and keep pandemics at Bay)
The death rate and rate of severe complications would indicate that the numbers are much lower than that. The death rate is something like 1%. Also all this concern about lack of ventilators seems to have been unfounded, turns out ventilators are doing more harm than good with this virus and damaging the lungs, a lot of people are being put on oxygen tanks.
There is no way to eliminate the risk completely. If you look at the numbers, if this virus were allowed to spread uncontrollably then it would be like a bad flu season. Plenty of people die from them flu every year and we never shut down the world for it.
What really needs to be done, since most deaths are in nursing homes, is to do everything possible to prevent nursing home residents from getting infected in the first place. The shutdown/lockdown did nothing to prevent that. Serious measures were only taken after outbreaks (in a specific home) began and by then it was too late, and to make matters worse very few homes were equipped to manage this sort of situation. And on top of that, due to the shutdown it was impossible to purchase certain items (not just PPE) which could have helped to prevent the spread within each home. In other words, the way this situation was managed was totally backwards.
NYC might be a different situation, I haven’t been following what was going on there but I hear there are a lot of deaths. On the other hand there is India, where it was predicted that millions would die but in the end they only have something like 1000 deaths. Each situation is different due to demographics, living conditions, and health/immunity of the people so you can’t make blanket recommendations for the whole world except that the sick and elderly need to be isolated. Having people in nursing homes should have made this easier to manage since they were already isolated to a degree, but in many cases the situation was not handled correctly and lead to disaster.
