With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
You really have to grade Biden on a curve IMO. I'm sympathetic to him on COVID and Afghanistan, and while I don't agree with his handling of COVID, I can't say how I'd react when put into a similar position. Even more sympathetically, it's not clear to me how much he was really in control of the presidency. Is it really his fault that he got Weekend at Bernie'd into being president?
Would you have threatened the livelihood of 100,000,000 citizens unless they submitted to an unconstitutional mandate that abrogated their right to bodily autonomy? Even after massive concerns from multiple constitutional scholars?
If so, could you elaborate on that a little?
We're working with contrafactuals, but if I truly believed that the virus was an existential threat in the way it was sold as, I truly wouldn't know. For better or for worse, I'd see myself as responsible for the people who died. Like I said, I don't know what I'd do, but I can't imagine that it was a simple or easy choice.
Of course, this is all assuming that politicians actually want what's best for the country and are not a cabal of soul-sucking freaks.
I mean, we had a pretty good idea what the IFR was by that point, so if someone bought this, I think it could only really come down to innumeracy.
A relatively small number of deaths can easily cause massive economic problems and overwhelm hospitals leading to all sorts of problems including...you guessed it, more deaths.
The problem wasn't the lockdowns. They were sensible. The problem was the way they were implemented and not having a reasonable offramp.
If every hospital we have were suddenly carpet bombed tomorrow, would there be some increased follow-on deaths? Absolutely. Would it be an existential threat?! Please.
FYI, this subthread (from birb_cromble) seems to be referring to vaccine mandates rather than lockdowns.
I'm not saying it was truly an existential threat, but it was way worse than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge. What those numbers translate to practically is pretty bad. It's hard to notice if you were locked up though, which many were...so they didn't.
Well, the question is whether the President is in a position to know that wasn't an existential threat. If you're the President and ignorant people think it's an existential threat, but you know that it's not an existential threat, you help them understand that it's not an existential threat. And then we move to the next question of whether you would have "threatened the livelihood of 100,000,000 citizens unless they submitted to an unconstitutional mandate that abrogated their right to bodily autonomy? Even after massive concerns from multiple constitutional scholars?"
"Sufficiently damaging to the economy, American lives, and functioning of the government" isn't quite the same as "existential threat" and still justifies much of what happened.
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