[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.

[read_if_gay_]

I think this idea is idealistic. It's easy to say now that we should've reacted immediately. But try just getting public support for drastic lockdown measures when the virus was new enough to have about as much impact on people's daily lives as the latest hospital bombing somewhere in Afghanistan.

[winocm]

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

[read_if_gay_]

I wish you the best. Hope you get better.

[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.