Tophattingson
No bio...
User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
I suspect that my opposition to lockdown is, while not irrational in itself, filled with irrationality when it comes to what I should do in opposition. Trying to convince people by rhetoric to e.g. not support the government locking me down is a waste of time, and I'd be better off if I just hit the gym and got so swole that nobody would have dared challenge me over masks, vaccines or whatever ever again. I certainly noticed that those most frequently threatened by staff/police/etc over masks were frail, short women.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Most vaccine mandate supporters believed, approximately, that covid is that dangerous, and that vaccines are that good. Which is why setting any conditions on when a vaccine mandate becomes acceptable is a waste of time - if there's a condition, governments will just lie to meet it.
Seems to me that you just gave your rational justification for being so fiercely activated.
Anyway, to further elaborate on these feelings, lockdowns are a personal threat to you (and to me). Of course people react negatively towards people threatening them. Whether that be "I want to kidnap you" or "I want the government to kidnap you" should make little difference. Wanting to hurt me, but being too cowardly to do it yourself and instead insisting on the government doing it for you, does not impress me. And, of course, being unvaccinated, I also find advocates of vaccine mandates to be making a personal threat to me when they do so. Against my repeated refusal, you insist on inserting your prick into me and squirting genetic material out of it? You just might be a rapist.
The fact that most of the value of housing in the UK is land and not buildings is admittedly less well known.
Can drill it down narrower. The value of housing comes not from the land, but from land you are permitted to build on. The value of land goes up a lot when it acquires planning permission. Typical residential land value, post-permission, is £1-2m per hectare.. Agricultural land is instead closer to £25k per hectare.
Janet, 72, retired, extracts massive rents not because she owns a house, and doesn't pay tax on the land upon which the house is sat. Rather, they come from her dutiful efforts to elect local councillors who will prevent housebuilding at all costs (every single major party stands on Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone at local elections), and persistent formal complaints against any effort to build anything at all. I don't see how Georgism is meant to be a fix for this. The issue isn't that there isn't enough land. The issue is existing legal restrictions on what you can use land for. The "unimproved" value of residential land is also low, if you regard "legal permission to build" as an improvement.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
To be fair we understand viruses far better than we used to.
Do we, in a way that's meaningful for what many governments sought to do in 2020? We might know more on paper, but it's not clear to me that any of this knowledge had an impact for the goal of "protection against pandemics", which is distinct from mitigation. The information overload and the delusion that modelling would be accurate made things worse, not better. And for the more cynical, if covid was a result of gain of function research, then instead of protecting against pandemics, this additional understanding instead caused the pandemic.
yes we can have lockdowns but only if the virus is literally civilization ending
Governments can define what viruses are civilization ending. We know this because they already did this sort of redefinition before, not just for covid-19 but also for swine flu.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Identitarian is taken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement
Tophattingson
3yr ago
From what I understand, Woke was either an African-American Vernacular English term for "aware", or a severe corruption of the old "wake up" conspiracy theorist term, as in the meme "wake up sheeple".
Tophattingson
3yr ago
People can use a high IQ to better convince themselves and others of wrong positions, rather than seek correct positions.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
The media has an awful habit of memory-holing or reversing positions taken by various figures in March 2020. It's even harder to decipher the exact manuevering that took place because the published minutes don't match public statements. According to Sunak, SAGE minutes are manipulated to suppress disagreement, which is plausible because, taken literally, nobody supported lockdowns until after they were in place.
Cummings wanted to replicate China's lockdowns, it seems. This is likely more from a sheer contrarian streak than any rational reason, as the pre-2020 consensus was lockdowns being somewhere between bad and unthinkable - so unthinkable nobody even considered to call them bad because nobody was ever suggesting them. Perhaps also a bit of mysticism about East Asian healthcare.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)
Neither did Dominic Cummings consider himself bound by these lockdown policies, resulting in him being booted over a trip to Barnard Castle.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
He was sunk by a combination of breaking the rules his government set and probably lying about it on the floor.
This skips one and a half years of increasingly large rebellions from backbenchers over lockdown restrictions. This culminated in him breaking rules, responding to breaking rules by imposing new restrictions (some backbenchers regarded these rules as nothing but petty vengeance for boris being caught), and a rebellion so large that the only reason votes passed is that labour abstained. He then limped on with a powerless government for several months until a largely inconsequential scandal was used as an excuse to finally ditch him.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
The pandemic response was so obviously, monstrously incompatible with the ideas of Classical Liberalism that it's questionable whether someone who merely describes the failings as "mishandled in some critical regards" even meaningfully qualifies as a Classical Liberal. The state can do whatever the fuck it wants as long as it says "because pandemic" at the end of it? That ain't anything-Liberal.
The role of government is to provide [...] protection against pandemics.
Not by any pre-2020 definition of the word classical liberalism. Did the government protect you against the 1918 pandemic? No. The median action was nothing. Did the government protect against the mid-century flu pandemics? No. Again, median action was nothing. HIV? Any Classical Liberal I can name would have strongly opposed recriminalizing homosexuality. As someone in the comments over there already put it, it's recency bias. The position of Classical Liberals pre-2020, to the extent they even had a position, would have been that the government is not meaningfully placed to outright prevent pandemics, just as it's not able to prevent e.g earthquakes, and thus it should not even have the power to attempt this. They could even point to the parable of King Canute and the tide.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
But this is ultimately what I'm saying. They hang the blame for the debacle on 'us' since diffusing responsibility and shuffling blame for political outcomes to 'the people' who ostensibly voted for it is, as mentioned, the primary purpose of Classical Liberalism these days.
One of the purposes of a representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, is that the buck stops with the representatives, not the voters. Legal responsibility for a government's actions fall on them, not the general public.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Why would it benefit Russia to accidentally blow up Boris Johnson? Why would the Poles hate Russia less if Duda gets got?
At least in my case, that would improve my opinion of Russia.
When Jesse Singal was interviewed by Destiny, they talked for an hour and a half through these tiny viewports, while unrelated Elden Ring gameplay footage played on center stage throughout.
There's something fascinating about this video, which seems to be a pattern that I've noticed in the ultra-online US left, where for all the admonishment they'll do of their own side, whenever they speak about anyone right-wing, they speak as if they are so far beneath them that even when right-wingers agree with them they are wrong. I'm not really sure how to phrase it, but it's like... they treat even the centre-right, who in theory should agree with them on far more than the far-left, as axiomatically wrong? As if their perpetual wrongness is just an inherent part of the universe. Almost this meme. And they end up doing the rhetorical equivalent of contortionist backflips to agree with them while pretending to disagree with them.
It's just a very strange attitude to have if you're actively trying to discuss flaws within your own side. Shouldn't you at least give credence to the possibility that those on the other side of the aisle might be right, even if not specifically so in this instance? Seeing a discussion that acknowledges uncertainty in their own views, while simultaneously absolute certainty on others, is weird.
Edit: The highlight here is when they address that conservatives calling out insane views on Twitter, which initially they attributed to being niche nobodies, but now acknowledge as actually becoming mainstream views. Then they just... Blitz past it without acknowledging that they were wrong, and those filthy rightoids were right. Or the Covington and Rittenhouse stuff - shouldn't conservatives get credit for calling it right?
Are you taxing land, or are you taxing land value? If it's the latter, you can definitely lower the production of land value. I could make my house look super-ugly, put bars over the windows and cover the lawns in trash to reduce it's valuation. If you think you can decouple this as an improvement distinct from the value of the land itself... good luck.
People will deliberately uglify their homes to avoid taxes. The UK has experience with this, back when we had a window tax. Intended to be a simple way to assess property taxes - larger houses have more windows, windows can be counted from the outside, can't cheat the number of windows you have. People responded by bricking up their windows and living in darkness instead of paying the tax.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
It's only in the actual advent of a pandemic that the safetyists came out of the woodwork and demanded the opposite prescription.
Then we should be able to find this woodwork that they came out of. I've looked for it before. It ain't there. There's no segment of the public health community that, prior to 2020, thought imprisoning the entire population of a country in their own homes in the long-term was a suitable response to anything.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
What more could I ask for? In the UK, the maximum penalty for falsely imprisoning someone is 20 years. The government has, collectively, ~210,000,000 counts of false imprisonment to answer for. So the most I could ask for is Boris being imprisoned approximately until the sun explodes.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...
Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?
The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.
Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Legal suicide indeed isn't the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia.
I see the combination of government being strong enough to engage in systematic torture of the population, as evidenced by lockdowns, and also offering euthanasia to be a uniquely dangerous combination of circumstances. At it's most extreme, consider the practice of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union. Dissidents were classed as mentally ill, with the nonsense-diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". This didn't progress to outright euthanasia as e.g the Nazis did, but if there's no pre-existing barriers to euthanasia, like there is now in places like Canada, it's very easy to see that progression. All this hypothetical government need do to kill a bunch of dissidents is make their lives unliveable with restrictions (such as targeting the unvaccinated with vaccine mandates) cause them severe unhappiness via the circumstances, misdiagnose that as depression rather than the normal affect towards the circumstances, and off them.
This is personal, too. My very vehement disagreement with lockdowns lead some now-former family members (as in, I distanced myself from them in response to this) to falsely accuse me of mental illness because I refused to provide information to a track and trace scheme. I see a concerningly short path from the government legalizing euthanasia to them trying to use it to find some reason to murder people like me.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
I think our current governments would euthanise a lot more than just the elderly if they could.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
In countries without Euthanasia, people being denied access to medical treatment leads to dissent, disagreement and debate over policy, and potentially, the policy being changed in future. Seemingly, in countries with Euthanasia, it (at least in this example) leads to suicides. Not all pressure valves are good. Euthanasia permitting greater misrule as angry people instead become dead people is a plausible problem.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Left-leaning spaces do not equally apply slur, the definition of slur is set in a way that's favourable to left-leaning etc etc.
Sorry, it's just a bit rich to hear that left-leaning spaces are intrinsically nicer after the last three years of people in hobby spaces treating me as subhuman, whether for disagreeing with lockdowns or for not taking whatever injections my government demands of me. Many of these supposedly left-leaning hobbyist spaces are casually, pervasively hateful in a way that only doesn't get recognised as hate because hate gets defined in whatever way is most useful to them at the time. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in wanting someone locked down. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in demanding that unvaccinated people be stabbed by needles. (this is why I am relatively supportive towards anti-lockdown people who e.g. shout abuse and threats at legislators - don't dish out what you can't take) And to bring the further-left into this as well, there is real, serious hate in demanding that others live under socialist or communist regimes. Supporting the Soviet Union is as racist towards Ukrainians as supporting the Nazis is towards Jews. It's so pervasive that even people on my side often recognise these things as wrong yet completely overlook the whole hatred angle of it!
Convincing people to take a ill-defined, extreme response to a ill-measured, extreme risk is called a Pascal's Mugging, and everything that has been said on the axioms and implications of Pascal's Mugging is available with a quick google search... Except for one thing I want to elaborate on.
Pascal's Muggings arguments often fail to consider that muggings go both ways. In the case of climate change, environmentalists often overlook the equally existential, equally ill-defined risks of an over-enthusiastic reaction to climate change. Just as there are tipping points in the climate, there may be tipping points in human welfare beyond which pursuing environmentalism causes a catastrophe. For instance, European energy prices spiralling to infinity as European governments increasingly refuse to produce energy, so to deflect mounting public anger at declining living standards, they blame Putin, and then the populace decides to take these claims of it being Putin's fault way too seriously, leading to a chain of events culminating in a pointless nuclear exchange. Yes, this risk is very ill-defined, but it's not zero, so that puts it in the same category of risk as the climate change tipping points. It's another mugging. You're getting mugged by two people at once. Who do you hand your money to?
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