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I think government leaders largely deferred to public health authorities, and those public health authorities saw this as the opportunity of their lifetime to Do Good and Make A Difference. Bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they weren't keen to acknowledge any shortcomings or limits to their knowledge, and put their hands in all the pies they could fit in. Many of those bureaucrats had a very ideological take on what Doing Good looks like. My state banned fishing and then later on one of its counties promoted having sex through a hole in a shower curtain.
They also never put any safeguards against abuse in place. Not just on health departments but no level of government put in any explicit limits on what could be done, or requiring legislative approval, or even gave an explicit deadline of under what conditions the government would declare it over. It was a blank check, heck a credit card with no limits that only expired when those who had been given the card declared they no longer needed it.
And to me, I see some elements of what red-pillers call a shit-test; one we clearly failed as a society. Most people just meekly accepted whatever the government decided whether or not it made sense. In fact, the people were more upset at the pushback than anything else. And while I don’t think the government did all of this with future applications in mind, I think the government has basically learned that it can actually get away with quite a lot if it provided that the people are frightened enough.
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Link please
Fishing ban: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/mar/25/statewide-fishing-ban-ordered-by-washington-wildli/
It lasted until May 5. No accommodation for people who obtain significant amounts of food from catching their own.
Shower curtains for sex: https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/12/07/covexxx-19-has-king-county-public-health-gone-too-far/
Y'know, I wonder how COVID affected the "glory hole" tag on various sites...
Surely you know about how Canada's CDC actually recommended gloryholes for pandemic-safe sex, which is the most ridiculous and short-sighted wannabe bandwagon jumping thing I've ever seen:
https://www.complex.com/life/2020/07/canadian-health-officials-suggest-glory-holes-for-sex-during-covid19
That was just BC AFAIK -- the previously unexplored correlation of glory hole fans with government functionaries in Greater Cascadia is... noteworthy I guess.
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I think that a large part of public health authority decisionmaking was simply trying to take burden off their workers, who often were particularly horribly overburdened at the start of the crisis but without matching bonuses or pay increases (since the future of the budgets of those institutions had also, for obvious reasons, gone completely up in the air). Basically the only way to placate the workers they had at this point was lobbying for restrictions in hopes that it would somehow reduce this burden of work. However, increasingly as the crisis went on, this was also countered and balanced by businesses lobbying for reopening (including vaccine passports as a partial mean of reopening).
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