[native_samples]

"what I would like is roughly ... the ability to do mostly normal life, but with restrictions on large events and mandated precautions such as masks. Along with vaccinations that would probably have been a sustainable state."

To be clear, are you stating you would like all large events to be permanently banned forever.

[BoxOfRain]

A lot of people (mostly older people in my experience) seem to think that people who work in the events industry should just curl up in an alleyway and die at this point. According to the more authoritarian-inclined, COVID means we can never ever have festivals, clubs, or anything like that again in the name of biosecurity. Personally I'd rather chew on razor wire than inhabit the mind-numbingly beige world of dull conventionality these people so clearly have never left in their lives.

I really don't like this new orthodoxy of "safetyism" which to me is a slavish adherence to the precautionary principle, a general approach of authoritarianism, and excessive influence of technocratic institutions which aren't subject to the usual political processes. This kind of ideology existed long before COVID but the pandemic has massively increased its influence. If people like authoritarianism and technocracy I'd rather they argued for them openly and in good faith than trying to use the pandemic as a smokescreen. There's nothing wrong with arguing for these things but I cannot stand people who dress their political opinions in lab coats and try to pass them off as science. There's no one true approach here, and pretending there is has caused a lot of avoidable strife in my opinion.

Politics is so much more than "follow the science", I think we'll regret in the future that we only gave seats at the table to epidemiologists and bureaucrats when it came to this pandemic rather than including a far wider range of scientific disciplines, experts in philosophy (especially ethics), and broader industry representation. The events industry has been done dirty in my opinion for example.