Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
3yr ago
People's thinking about genocide generally starts and ends with "goodies in charge means no genocide, baddies in charge means genocide". I think the topic of the state infrastructure required to enable genocide will go over their heads.
You're right about lockdown-related state infrastructure also being indicative of what countries could carry out genocide. The infrastructure Canada used to carry out a political and social purge of unvaccinated people could trivially be pointed at ethnic minorities and used for genocide too. And there's certainly something in how China's covid surveillance infrastructure and Uighur surveillance infrastructure are the same infrastructure. But again, I think "If you can do lockdowns, you can also do genocide" is likely to go over people's heads (or, in Canada, mark you as one of the anti-vaxxers to be purged). OP is a teacher at a school, having to impress other teachers at that school, in a society that for the past two years has marked people who dissent on these matters as persona non grata. They'd be more likely to survive just outright ignoring the day than by trying to point out the connections between lockdowns and the oppression of ethnic groups, even if it's likely relevant to why Nunavut had the least stringent vaccine mandate policies.
There are no safeguards and yet they do OK.
Well, we did okay until the Coronavirus Act 2020 created rule by decree - executive was able to create new laws without input from parliament.
Believe it or not, this is how the Framers originally saw Presidential elections going most of the time, with the EC failing to find a majority and the election being forced to the House, except when a 'man of national renown' (read, at the time of the Philadelphia Convention: Washington) had the charisma, fame, and respect to garner an outright EC majority.
And 1824 is the only time this actually happened, right?
Tophattingson
3yr ago
The Canadian government's actions against political dissidents over the last two years leave it a non-democracy regardless of election procedures. You can't have free, fair elections if huge swaths of political opinion are the target of state violence. After the use of the emergencies act against people protesting vaccine mandates, how certain can we be that Trudeau won't engage in similar attacks on his other political opponents when expedient?
Tophattingson
3yr ago
As already said below, Covid deaths are, by the numbers, no bigger a deal than a number of other things that don't cause giant public freakouts. The distinction isn't death numbers. We got this for covid and not heart disease, plausibly, because there's no (or at least no easy) way to turn avoiding heart disease into an all-consuming ideology sustained through isolation, decimation of support structures, and hatred of dissenters. If anything, the opposite would happen. No-heart-disease-mania would manifest in being physically active and psychologically healthy, quite unlike the self-destructive behaviours encouraged by lockdownism. It would present plenty of encounters with dissenters who you are already primed to at least heed, telling you that maybe spending your entire life living like a hyper fitness obsessed monk to extend your lifespan by a few weeks isn't a good trade-off.
"Mass Formation Psychosis" just seems like a buzzword.
There's definitely something self-sustaining to lockdownism that makes it uniquely powerful as a variant of totalitarianism. Most ideologies have some sort of engine that, whether by design or by accident, sustains them, by bringing in new people and stopping them from leaving. Dawkins would have described it as a meme by his original intent: a self-replicating bit of culture, some of which are far better at self-replicating than others and of which lockdownism might just be the best ever at spreading.
But I don't think there's anything spooky like "Psychosis" explaining this. I think it's rather simple, actually. The core tenants of lockdownism are self-sustaining. That is to say, if you actually believe in these restrictions and carry them out, then the process of doing this will sustain your own belief in lockdowns:
They control behaviour by robbing people of everyday life. They destroy bonds of friends, family and work, and replace these bonds with bonds to distant figures like Fauci. They make people financially reliant on leadership (i.e the government) for survival. They isolate people from dissenting information by keeping people locked up in their houses, unable to hear or even see those who disagree - all outside sources are dismissed as not merely wrong, but actively dangerous. Any contact with people who don't agree with lockdowns is frowned upon above and beyond that of contact in general - they disagree, therefore they are more likely to be infected, and are more likely to kill you. Through masking, your empathy towards others is decreased. At a broader scale, political pluralism and serious disagreement are de facto outlawed via a combination of bans on public meetings and censorship of alternatives to public meetings...
The weakness is in the long-term. Once everyone is entrenched in this system, the economic wellbeing of society inevitably tanks to the point where it becomes unsustainable. These systems of control don't function once you have rolling blackouts knocking out information control infrastructure, seized up supply networks blocking deliveries, and people emerge from their isolation in desperate search fulfilling basic needs. They also don't function once people notice that the prophesies are failing, and the sinners aren't all dead - Bill down the road is one of those disgusting anti-vaxxers, and you've not spoken to him in months, but somehow his car keeps coming and going. In this regard, vaccine mandates could be seen as a way to resolve this discomfort - a way to make manifest in the real world the sufferings that are meant to befall the prophesized enemies, after they fail to emerge as a result of their sins.
It really shares quite a lot in common with the strategies that cults use to manipulate members. It's just that in this case, the policy prescription of lockdowns is inherently manipulative, rather than (or alongside) being intentionally so. Unlike a cult, it never replaces comradery with the outside world with comradery with the cult itself, instead just leaving a miserable void. Perhaps it's long-term instability is similar to Nazism and Communism, rather than religious cults - it feels good while you're killing Jews/Kulaks/whatever, but inevitably the reality that you can't sustain a society based on killing imaginary enemies sets in.
I don't know if this is a steelman of Mass Formation Psychosis, however. Maybe this is what those people are really getting at, beneath the layers of buzzwords.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
You don't even really explain what your position is (No lockdowns whatsoever? Lesser lockdowns? Lockdowns until 3 weeks after vaccines were available to all and not a day longer? Lockdowns implemented voluntarily by non-governmental organizations but not any by the government? Government campaigns against social distancing so it doesn't drag on due to voluntary behavior? Better-targeted lockdowns that don't do useless things like restrict borders after it is already spreading domestically?) let alone explain why you have that position.
Why do they have to have a separate position and explain it? If there was a political trend advocating for hitting the Earth with an asteroid, would you demand that critics of asteroid billiards provide an alternative policy beyond just not doing that? Sometimes, simply saying "don't do that" needs no further elaboration. See also, politician's syllogism.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
Medicine does not work on the basis of theoretical mechanisms, but rather on the basis of empirical results. The most obvious example of this is general anaesthesia, which has no solid theoretical basis for why it works, but we definitely know it does work. Masks are the opposite. Work in a spherical cow sense in blocking particles in a lab. When applied to the real world? No evidence they reduce covid spread.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
If I thought it was the case that this was the only way to return to the pre-2020 consensus that imprisoning the entire population for no reason was unthinkable, then I'd support foreign invasion and/or violent revolution. However, I do not.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
It's not merely rankest hypocrisy. It's also not a return to normal. Normal is when people who impose e.g. false imprisonment get dragged through the courts and then sentenced for their crimes. Certainly I can't imagine many people in 2019 responding to "what should be done to a leader who -list of restrictions-" with anything less than a few court cases.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
This just amplifies the important of archiving to prevent intelligentsia memory-holing their past statements. At the very least they should publicly rebuke their past selves, not merely pretend they disagreed all along.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
You'd need to look at a country that never saw adoption of masks to confirm that masks were the culprit. Sweden is basically the only country I can think of to avoid mass masking, either cultural or legally enforced. They seem to also report no influenza season: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publikationer-och-material/publikationsarkiv/i/influenza-in-sweden-season-2020-2021/?pub=99545
Tophattingson
3yr ago
I was hoping the US would adopt a mask culture similar to what Japan has, where wearing a mask is common for people that have the sniffles but need to go out and get groceries, and its not weird to put a mask on when you are on the train with a bunch of gross randos.
This is still performative masking, it's just one-step higher up on the political posturing scale. In the US, you wear a mask to signal that you care in a specifically blue-tribe way. In Japan, you wear a mask to signal that you care (or, sometimes, to disguise your face). Neither actually does any caring, of course, as the solution to not spreading respiratory diseases to others is to stay at home and eat chicken soup or whatever your regional equivalent of this is.
Tophattingson
3yr ago
It's quite likely we'll get some actual information on it from one of the relevant legal cases at some point.
To give an opposite option: If you really want to go down in flames, find a charity relating to the church burnings that happened in 2021 (there's gotta be one, either generally linked to churches that were burned or specifically trying to repair them). Put that on your shirt.
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