[LatteLazy]

It's interesting that no one seems to give a shit about real freedoms like free speech or democracy, detention without trial or access to lawyers. But when you close the pubs (or the artisnal pasta makers), suddenly we're on a dictatorship.

[jmnicolas]

This is so unjust: you don't know me but you basically reduce me to an angry guy that can't get drunk with his friends.

ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better).

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.

As I said I'm not from the UK but as far as I know people in London had more freedom during the WWII aerial bombings.

[jacobsenscott]

There was never a "freedom to post" on social media, so you haven't lost that. The idea of "freedom of speech" was formed during a period of time when there were natural barriers to speech such that bat shit crazy qanon conspiracy theories and other such nonsense couldn't propagate widely. Nobody ever intended "freedom of speech" to equal a right to use a frictionless machine to propagate lies to billions.

Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time.

Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship.

As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control.

Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.

[djur]

So far the outcome of the "disgusting spectacle" in the US has provided evidence against the risk of incipient dictatorship, not for it. States mobilized to various degrees of success to enable voting despite the pandemic, and the result was the highest turnout since 1900.

And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship

Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...

[onion2k]

When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.

On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.

[read_if_gay_]

Frankly, people are always dying. Deaths don't automatically outweigh everything. This logic quickly breaks down once you apply it consistently. Traffic accidents are a huge cause of deaths, yet we don't ban all vehicles.

There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Such as suicides due to depression amplified by social isolation.

Those costs should be factored in. It's not as simple as a blanket "people are dying so everything is justified".

[onion2k]

You're talking about death as something abstract. I'm not. I'm saying I would prefer not to die, even if it costs the economy a lot.

Perhaps you'd give up your life, or your child or partner or parent, to save a handful of jobs but that's quite weird in my opinion. Economies can be rebuilt. Dead people can't be brought back.

[read_if_gay_]

The situation as it is does not pit option A: "you die right now" vs. option B: "save a handful of jobs". You are still oversimplifying the issue. In reality, both options are just modifying chances, and both options entail a huge number of second order effects. This needs to be weighed. It's not as simple as saying "well option A is literal death, so the other must always be better". And pointing that out does not mean I'd die to save a handful of jobs.

The flu also kills hundreds of thousands of people, and it does so each and every year. So should we be in permanent lockdown? After all, it's lives versus a handful of jobs.

[wonnage]

How many of those suicides are from people who are broke for pandemic-related reasons, and could've been prevented had we controlled the pandemic early (i.e, with a strict lockdown)?

[scarby2]

Devils advocate: how many of those suicides are caused directly by the restrictions and not the pandemic, how many extra would have lost their sanity due to a stricter lockdown?

Truth is we're not taking much time to measure the non-covid, non economic outcomes

[wonnage]

The whole point of a strict lockdown would've been to nip the problem in the bud via drastic measures. Based on the experiences of other countries, it should've lasted about 3-4 weeks.

[winocm]

I lost my sanity during this year's "lockdowns".

[jschwartzi]

Why does there have to be a dichotomy here? Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown.

That seems to be the most humane option. Make it illegal to evict people, provide them with a reasonable base income that allows them to lead a dignified life through the lockdown, and then shut everything down for a little while.

Suggesting that the lockdown is synonymous with loss of livelihood is exactly the problem here. Surely the same elected officials that have the power to close everything down also have the power to authorize emergency payments to those impacted by the lockdown.

[sangnoir]

> Another option would be to lock down but also to provide for people who will otherwise be ruined by the lockdown.

Well, that's will just establish a beachhead for socialism, and that is reserved for big business.

[detritus]

During Rationing, you mean?

[jtbayly]

Yes. During rationing.

[tinus_hn]

In the Netherlands, although not in every city, in some COVID-19 is an excuse for banning demonstrations.

[switch007]

It was made law in the UK

[detritus]

Hence my enclosing Freedoms in single quotes.

I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.

[LatteLazy]

I think you're exactly correct.

It drives me nuts when people talk about freedom, they have no actual idea what freedom is or takes and their actions undermine it. Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences", but that's what people really want.

Freedom is just a better sounding word than selfishness these days :(

<Steps-down-from-soapbox>

[carlmr]

>Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences"

Depends on your definition of freedom. The issue with this kind of freedom is that your freedom encroaches on other people's freedoms, so most societies agreed that we should have less freedom in favor of fairness.

Exactly where the trade-off is to be made is subjective and cannot be derived from facts alone.

We have a lot of freedoms that encroach on other people's freedoms, it's impossibly to make a clear cut on where fair ends and personal freedom begins.

Allowing people the freedom to sell sugar will inevitably lead to more diabetes and earlier death. It tastes good and it's addictive.

Sugar costs a lot of people some of their freedom to live and move. But if we didn't allow selling sugar we would take away the seller's freedom and the freedom to choose from the consumer.

[jtbayly]

Your sugar example is no good. Sugar doesn’t take people’s freedoms away. It has no agency and doesn’t enforce anything. Like any action, eating sugar may have consequences good or bad for the individual, but that has nothing to do with freedoms unless the government starts telling people they may not eat more than x grams per day or something like that.

[jschwartzi]

In the case of masks and lockdowns the "freedom" in question is more analogous to drunk driving. This is in the sense that exercising the freedom could cause the people around you some severe life-altering problems, and you're imposing that risk without their consent or knowledge.

[nradov]

That's always been the case. Thousands of people die every year from influenza spread by asymptomatic carriers. COVID-19 is more deadly, but that's just a difference in degree. Where do we draw the line?

[jtbayly]

Without their knowledge or consent? You can’t tell whether people are wearing masks and make a decision about whether to be around them? I suspect that even a blind person could do so the moment somebody started talking.

I’m sure there are still better comparisons than drunk driving. If you are under 55, the risk is about the same as dying from a car accident.

[dboreham]

Cue Mel Gibson as William Wallace.

[im3w1l]

To many people democracy is just a means to an end. And the end goal is a simple life with simple pleasures.