[AndrewUnmuted]

The burden of proof is on those who promote the lockdowns as an effective strategy to show how they help. This is because without that proof, so many other issues arise from legal, ethical, and practical perspectives that make supporting it not just non-scientific, but also highly irrational.

Legally, what right do our nations have to shutter businesses as they did? Where in the legal frameworks do they legitimately yield such enormous & violent authority over us? Did they do enough to protect & compenate us all against these violations of our rights?

Ethically, is this even a moral way to conduct statecraft during a pandemic? Is scapegoating appropriate at a time like this, and were we right to erode so much of our monetary base to provide the benefits that states did to their citizenry, necessitated by the lockdowns in the first place?

And practically, how many people have been harmed or killed by the conditions of lockdowns? How many people committed suicide who otherwise wouldn't? How much industrial output was sacrificed and how did this impact the deaths of despair that rose considerably over the last 1.5 years? How many people didn't get their cancer detected early enough to survive it? How many people didn't get their emergency medical care due to the chaos caused by lockdowns and perished as a result? Did these figures remain low enough to make the actual policies of lockdown worth it?

[spookthesunset]

Again, people just downvote this stuff. What gives? It is a good faith argument being made here and the poster has valid points.

Is it really that impossible that well meaning, intelligent people can completely disagree with how society handled covid?

[imprisonedinvic]

I just want to say it out loud. spookthesunset, __blockcipher__, AndrewUnmuted and everyone who shares the same sentiment and did speak up here - thank you all so much! You, folks, are the last straw I'm clinging onto, as the world goes down in a fiery mess. I would upvote all your posts, if I could. Keep speaking, you are saving lives! The amount of lies and outright hostility from everyone in any kind of power since the beginning of "pandemic" is absolutely unbearable now.

My family is under much-lauded, short-and-sharp, snap lockdown of over 230 days in Victoria, Australia. With 9pm curfew and 5km chain leash. Homeschooling three kids, oldest in y12 and youngest in kindy. We are being asked by the premier not to worry, the beautifully effective tools of lockdowns and curfews will be with us even after 80% of fully-vaxed. Masks will be mandatory for years to come. Contact tracing too. Riot police is as enthusiastic about enforcing 100% vaxx, as they were about zero-covid. By beautiful logic, because zero-covid is not attainable anymore, the "health advice" changed overnight and all the restrictions must ... stay the same! Until 100% vaxx, perhaps. Take no prisoners! And invitation-only "journalists" only ask "why not locking down earlier and harder"? I had a good friend confronting me with "you must be wanting to kill ten percent of 60+" and "feeling conspiratorial" when I said I do not support most of the actions taken.

I, personally, did step out of house only a handful of times during the last two years. Wearing facemask gives me acute psychosis. Seeing people wearing them makes me cry. I'm scared that I will start throwing punches if I see police or anyone enforcing this madness. There was no moment in the last two years when I did not feel anger, despair or complete apathy. I defy the curfew and walk my dog at midnight, in the middle of nowhere. If stopped, I plan on claiming "providing care", as it is one of the "allowed" reasons to break the curfew. If asked to whom, the answer will be "myself". I flip the police chopper when I see it loitering. Daily.

I gained 20 kilos, got myself a proper diabetes (I never even had elevated blood sugar before this), losing my eyesight, having chest pains and all that. My wife has been cut from minuscule support for a life-long medical condition, under premise that she is not successful enough in mitigating the symptoms of that condition. Apparently, the support is a reward now. We lost all trust in governments, police, doctors and all sorts of public service orgs. I absolutely not going to any medical place for checkup or vax until mandates are lifted. Which may be never or too late, so realistically I'm looking to meet my end long before my youngest reaches 18. By diabetes, covid, or by my own hand. There is no light. There is no escape. There is no place on Earth where we, realistically, could move. Heck, we cannot look at houses to buy in Vic, yet alone in another state. Cannot visit parents overseas, cannot invite them here. Cannot even send a parcel! There is no advice I could give to my sons. There is only regret that we chose Victoria, that we chose Australia, that we chose to have kids, that we were born at all. We've gone from normal, relatively positive and healthy people to complete wrecks in less than a year. So, however "worthwile" it was for the world, I guess my family will be dismissed as collateral damage.

I'm done for. My capacity to fight is gone. To those utilitarians, who are lockdown enthusiasts and covid evangelists - you may rejoice in knowing the world will be better without people like me. After all, it will raise the vaxxed percentage by decreasing the denominator. This is what we hear from all sides. The feeling that you killed a bunch of people to improve overall mortality statistics must be delightful. I wish you all to live forever with this feeling, cannot think of anything more horrible.

End of story.

[spookthesunset]

And the crazy part is we are right. Our positions are well grounded in data and plain common sense. In ordinary times a common person would completely agree with us. None of our stuff would be subject to so much, well, incredibly awful responses.

Why so many people, even the smartest most grounded people I know, flipped a bit and ignored both common sense and easily accessible data is really beyond me. I truly don’t understand how so many people can ignore what their own eyes and brains tell them.

This whole thing is really something else. It’s gonna piss people off to say it but… this is really the first true mass hysteria of the internet age and while it sucks to be a skeptic it is truly both an amazing and frightening aspect of human behavior to witness.

[lithium_throw]

"Mass hysteria" is exactly what this is, and probably one of the greatest ones in history. I recently read "The Delusions of Crowds", written by E. Bernstein and published in 2021. Bernstein frequently notes that the author of the very well known "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", published in 1841 by Mackay and during the height of the British Railway Bubble, almost completely ignores that now well-known popular delusion.

Ironically, Bernstein had nothing to say about our response to Covid, and only occasionally parroted the accepted platitudes about the pandemic.

[throwrqX]

As someone who is pretty well read in Le Bon and crowd psychology I still think there are several key differences between traditional mass hysteria and the COVID response in certain countries.

[lithium_throw]

Like?

The formation of large blocs of people who will not tolerate any dissent to the current state of Covid thought, and the scapegoating of those who question or do not fall in line, and a corresponding decline in the social, moral, and economic health of a country, certainly bear striking similarities.

[lithium_throw]

I really feel for you. What kind of pandemic has turned huge numbers of formerly healthy people into overweight, demoralized, and socially isolated individuals? A pandemic of the mind, perhaps.