sohois
1d ago
Your hatred of being "lumped in" with them is misplaced
I don't have any issue with being lumped in with other people, it's a very common method of trying to discredit an argument.
But like I said to KMC above, if you actually want to win the argument and prevent lockdowns next time, you need to stop very easy wins for the other side like being tied to extremely dumb conspiracy theories.
sohois
1d ago
To be honest, I just don't believe you.
But more importantly, your thinking seems extremely blinkered, like you can't see the wood for the trees.
Covid was a very infectious disease, hence why even very strict lockdowns were mostly useless. Across the world a very large number of people died and probably a significant majority of the population was exposed to it.
How many people do you think died because of improper medical care from ventilators (keeping in mind the counterfactual where they might die anyway without any intervention)? What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures. It's a fraction of a fraction.
sohois
1d ago
I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.
Lockdowns came in, and persisted, because ultimately the public in most countries were in favour of them.
If you want to stop them next time, then you need to get the average person on side - and for the average person, being associated with "5G causes cancer" is enough for an instant dismissal. Even today, you won't find that many people who really understand how incredibly damaging lockdowns were. You can't win a political argument just by being right
sohois
2d ago
This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.
I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.
Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.
Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.
However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.
Maybe. Status quo is a powerful thing. But at the same time, now that lockdowns have been used, it's always going to be a tool people think about whenever there is some crisis. In the UK, for example, there has been a small outbreak of meningitis cases at a University. It's not remotely hard to find people calling for lockdowns. And polling exposed a huge chunk of the population who love being petty tyrants, even today you'll find something like 25% support for closing nightclubs forever.
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