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PaperclipPerfector  16hr ago (text post)   643 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 10, 2026

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I think the USA didn’t so as well as we like to tell ourselves on resisting tyranny. It was months before there was any serious pushback on restrictions. And even then, it was pretty minor. We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house and having a non-remote job. We still allowed the government to — without even a hint of an end-date — to shut down public venues, close schools, close businesses (that the government itself got to decide were not essential enough to be allowed to do business at all). There were no protests for weeks or months. There were no cases of people going to those places and opening them in defiance of the government fiat. Obeying and then changing your mind later isn’t resistance. Obeying and then changing your mind when the costs affected you personally is buyers remorse. There were no members of any government in the USA that objected to shutting down until … whenever the government defined the country “safe enough.” They never thought that they were laying the foundations for the next crisis and creating the precedent that it would be allowed to interfere with people’s lives indefinitely.

This worldview is incomprehensible to me. Do you believe the government should never enact any restrictions as a response to an emergency? If you’re a principled libertarian, I suppose it’s self-consistent, but the majority of people aren’t. Temporarily closing non essential businesses, social distancing and vaccination orders are all standard, reasonable responses to a pandemic and aren’t some new form of tyranny, there were similar responses during the Spanish flu (minus vaccines which weren’t as developed).

There were curfews in London during WW2 to protect civilians from bombings, do you view those as tyranny as well?

We still allowed the government to impose vaccination as the cost of leaving the house

I must have missed this part of the pandemic response.

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