[TrispusAttucks]

It's Authoritarianism in disguise.

Co-opt the symbols that are antithetical to your cause and turn them to your own.

It's a tragic and pathetic point of human civilization. People gathering behind a symbol that historically represents the opposite of what they are fighting for whilst totally naive to the irony.

Children who are adults but can't think for themselves like adults so they need a parental figure in the form of authoritarian institutions to tell them what to do because self reliance is just so scary. If they can't think for themselves how could anyone else in the country be mature enough to think for themselves.

This will be contested but to blame the historic "left" and "right" as equally responsible for the erosion of sanity is dishonest. I've been "left" my whole life but this drastic transition to Authoritarianism is firmly the blame of the modern "left". I'm considering adjusting my party alliance in response to this new world order.

[MattRix]

After the era of Trump and now this current era of book banning and preventing race-based topics in schools (among other things), I’m not sure how you can say the Authoritarianism comes from the left… unless you’re talking about temporary measures that were taken due to a global pandemic.

[jokethrowaway]

Wow, are we even experiencing the same world?

Democrats are in favour of giving the government lockdown power because of a flu with sub 1% mortality rate, promote cancel culture, promote racial discrimination ("positive discrimination") and limits freedom of speech ("hate speech").

20 years ago I was often debating against republicans who were against gay marriage and cannabis legalisation.

Oh, how the tables have turned.

[moistly]

Less that the tables have turned, and more that you define “progressive” using 20th century standards, not 21st century. Society caught up to you, and that’s good enough for you.

[MattRix]

The mortality rate isn’t really the problem with covid, it’s the way it overwhelms the hospitals, as has been demonstrated over and over again. Anyone who thinks the measures have been overblown has simply not talked to anyone who works in healthcare for the past two years.

On top of that cancel culture is barely a real thing, it’s really more like “consequence culture”, something that has always existed.

This may be a more controversial opinion, but I believe limiting hate speech is a good thing. I think you can make concrete rules around it, so I don’t buy the arguments that it will lead to a slippery slope of more speech being blocked.

[seanmcdirmid]

I would say the Democrats were making it up if the USA were the only country experiencing this pandemic. Unfortunately, I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus and it would disappear two weeks after Biden was elected.

[josephcsible]

> I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus

Trump never said that: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/campaign-press-rel...

[MattRix]

Well he did say “this is their new hoax” (at 7:30 in this speech: https://youtu.be/H2BO_2bnx3k).

And yeah, he wasn’t talking about the virus itself, but about how the democrats were turning it into a big issue… which of course they turned out to be right about. This is the same speech where he bragged that there were no American deaths, and now there are over a million.

[michaelmrose]

Covid isn't "a flu" and 1% mortality rate combined with very high permissibility in a disease that hospitalizes more like 10% of naive hosts and often keeps people in the hospital for weeks or even months is on net potentially disastrous because it had the potential to trivially overwhelm our health care resources leaving us with a mortality rate that would have included many of the 9% who would survive with hospitalization but not without.

This is why people especially in 2020 were freaking out. Not JUST the 3M we projected we might lose letting it run through us but the effect if it were to crash our health care system.

Please don't make throwaways to post covid misinformation here that you wouldn't post on your main account.

[moistly]

> the effect if it were to crash our health care system

The effects that we did see when it crashed the Italian, New York, UK, Iranian, Russian, etc. health care systems. Wherever sars-cov2 got away on the population, the results were absolutely devastating to the healthcare system. Blows me away that there are people who forget seeing bodies piling up like cordwood during the worst weeks of this pandemic.

[TrispusAttucks]

Mostly false. Missing context.

People are now stuck in hyperreality [1] with an inability to tell the difference between the simulation of reality (news, social media) and actual objective physical reality.

Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

Consume a diverse set of news media. If your watching a corporate news network you're most certainly being lied to more than you'd believe.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

[MattRix]

I’m not sure how that relates to this at all? If you think anything I wrote is untrue then point out which specific items.