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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that...

Was it? I think the principle debate here would be over whether it is ever acceptable for the government to restrict movement in the interest of safety. Would you bite the bullet and say that it is never okay, even if doing so would avert a dire outcome?

"Those who would give up essential Liberty".. etc?

I would literally say never and it is worth spending millions if not billions of lives to make sure the answer is never.

This is what we claimed to fight for in all those wars... freedom. If the state sets itself up against the freedom of the citizenry then it has abandoned every charge it ever held, betrayed all our dead, declared itself an enemy of the human race as it seeks to reduce the human to merely an expendable resource of the regime... and unlimited violence is justified to bring about its end as such.

A free person responds to those who'd chain them with violence. A feral animal has this much dignity. one who wouldn't is neither free, is surrendering their personhood, and is barely even an animal anymore, they have accepted being a mere symbiote, a cell, of an alien entity who cares not for them.

Conversely, I've always interpreted coordination around medical emergencies, such as lockdowns, as one of the basic reasons to have a government to begin with.

Covid was not an emergency and protecting us from mentally ill people dragging the rest of society along with their weird agenda, no matter the cost, is one of the core functions of government under the current iteration of the social contract. If the government instead acquiesced to these weirdos then the social contract is violated and the government has forfeited the Mandate of Heaven.

Covid was not an emergency

What about hospitals overflowing, not enough ventilators, etc.?

These were fake news items. Hospitals didn’t go over capacity and ventilators were known not to be the best treatment option.

Maybe in India and Brazil, not AFAIK in the US, certainly not in Europe.

There was always talk of these things as being just around the next corner, happening any minute now, if we do not pull all the stops and do everything now. Same narrative as with climate change. Problems first exaggerated and then extrapolated to justify maximalist demands for whatever measures. Not necessarily because anyone likes the measures, but these things seem to take on dynamics of their own in interactions between public, politics and media.

There was also the argument "people don't understand exponential growth. If it goes to half capacity it could easily go to full capacity tomorrow".

Turns out that people did understand exponential growth.

Those who proclaim "live free or die" should really decide which one they are, because at this moment most of them are neither dead nor free, not in the "you are only free when you can choose anything, not just anything that conveniently aligned with what the state is fine with you doing" meaning.

Otherwise what is this, a quantum superposition "until observed by the state" or something?

It's posturing or signalling. Useful to rally like-minded people to yourself, but not literally the intended course of action. But your question was rhetorical, wasn't it?

Oh it's simple, I'm just not going to obey.

I'll do whatever a free man does and if the State obstructs me I'll take any means of circumventing their tyranny up and including destroying the State if that's expedient.

But most of the time, forgery, piracy and contraband are enough. Killing the agents of tyranny is fun to boast about but it's never been a reliable means of securing freedom unless you have overwhelming firepower.

I'm just not going to obey. To the death.

Is that hypothetical or have you actually been doing any of these things?

Nice try feds.

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