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I know it's beating a dead horse at this point, but this whole Prigozhin situation made one fact crystal clear: American dissident right (and "anti-nato left" by extension) is extremely solipsistic, much more than other factions in American culture war. Just take a look at some of those takes which are prevalent among this crowd
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Essentially, their model of the world looks like: here we are, honest god-abiding Americans, and then there are "elites" — Biden, Hillary, DNC, Podesta, Bill Gates, World Economic Forum. How then do you view something that lies outside your usual experience and ideology? If you are dumb, you deny it altogether:
"Ukraine War is fake, all of it is CGI, Zelensky and Hunter Biden siphon gajillions dollars from American taxpayers to buy mansions in Bahamas"
For those people Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Finns, Prigozhin, Zaluzhny, Macron, Scholz, ... do not exist.
If you are smarter, you align yourself with perceived enemies of the elites: Putin, Xi, Orban, .... You say things like:
totally oblivious of cases like this
https://zona.media/online/2023/06/22/sko
being a regular occurrence in Russia, when a girl is sent to prison for putting anti-war slogans on price tags in a shopping mall. Of course they'll have prepared a long list of grievances with "elites" that are intended to persuade you that whatever happens in the US is much worse than repressions in Russia or China. And, sure enough, all of it "glownigger propaganda" anyway.
You might say: "Well, I don't care about anti-Putin Russians, unfortunate pro-Putin Russians who became victims of the regime, neutral Russians, Ukrainians, Uighurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, ... all I care is that my children don't get castrated and turned into trannies". Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
Whatever patience I had with American "anti-establishment" right-wingers, it ended. I guess Hanania is the only one I keep reading/listening at this point.
Due to me largely being a single-issue anti-lockdown guy at this point, I guess in the US I'd fall in with the "dissident right" even if I disagree with them on the majority of social issues. To give an example, I back LGBT rights in about the way you'd expect from a progressive but I can't back progressives in their current form because the end result of lockdownism is everyone, including LGBT people, equally having no rights. You can't claim to support LGBT rights and simultaneously criminalize sex).
So Russia... Fuck Russia. They too are a lockdownist regime, and I equally want Putin's head displayed on the end of a pike as I do the average prog. The place I differ is that I also want most western leaders heads lined up alongside his. Hence my stance on the war is that I hope both sides lose. Both sides losing probably requires that Russia lose first, because I don't see a route where a Russian victory leads to uprisings against Putin but a Ukrainian victory probably has Zelensky get turfed out in a few years if recent Ukrainian history is anything to go by.
There is a hypothetical world in which Russia are indeed liberating Ukraine from it's vile regime. The problem, of course, is that this isn't the actual circumstance. Belarus would have a slightly better case to make, as one of the few countries that avoided lockdowns, I'd at least give Lukashenko the time of day if he invaded Ukraine in 2020 to liberate Ukrainians from their regime - it would at least be a coherent cause. Even if Russia invaded the UK, I might defect to them just for the opportunity to get justice for the crimes that the British regime has committed against me, but it would be no more than pure opportunism on my part. But what exactly can Putin claim to liberate Ukraine from? From one corrupt lockdownist oligarchy to another? How utterly pointless.
The most notable form of repressions over the last few years were lockdowns, affecting billions. When it comes to how brutal these are, there isn't some vast difference between Russia and the West. Even China has typically behaved more courteously towards those protesting lockdowns than Western regimes have done. And if democracy is meant to be the difference, I wonder what exactly is supposed to be the difference between Putin's machinations and media control to win his elections, and western "mainstream" parties winning via similar censorship and violent attacks on dissidents? We no longer need to speculate. The paper trail of censorship of opponents of lockdowns has been traced back to governments.
But why do some on the dissident right actively support Putin rather than take my burn it all down including Russia approach? I don't think it's quite enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's more appeal to an outside power. Like cosmic intervention. Desperately hoping they'd swoop in to save the day. Just like far-left dissidents wanted the USSR to do during the cold war, or e.g. anti-Putin protesters in Russia sometimes want NATO to do. It's a cry for help because they do not see any way to depose their regime without external assistance. Which I reject, because I don't think Putin would replace their regime with what they want. Sweden, though? They can nuke me whenever they feel like it. Drone me harder Tegnell.
The social contract to not act in maximally selfish ways is broken, and the dissident right have a good claim that they aren't responsible for breaking it.
One thing I will say is how disappointing the lack of accountability there seems to be for the lockdown group. They created massive damage and it seems like everyone’s response is “who could’ve known”
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Is it right to be this level of angry over lockdowns? At least at the beginning, it wasn't obviously wrong. At some level of lethality of the virus, it would be the best thing to do, I think, since the hit to the economy and everyone else is worth keeping large swathes of the populace alive—just COVID was well below that, and hence the lockdowns were pretty harmful, especially in the places that they were more intense, and way too long lasting after it became apparent it was not going to accomplish its aims, and was a cure far worse than the (literal) disease.
The thing about lockdowns, at least in the U.S., is that their continued existence after COVID was found to be non-lethal wasn’t merely a costly mistake, but a form of political imprisonment. This may sound dramatic; let me explain.
In May 2020, police were kicking kids out of playgrounds in my blue town while marches and protests in memory of George Floyd were not only allowed, but encouraged. Remember, The Science declared that “racism is a bigger public health issue than COVID”. This unmasked (heh) the true nature of the lockdowns: citizens were imprisoned unless they were to participate in Party-approved political functions. Note that I do not suggest that the lockdowns were concocted from the beginning in order to achieve this aim; no cabal of doctors got together and crafted this plan back in March. But the effect of the lockdowns was equivalent to political imprisonment.
That’s why I have more anger towards the lockdown and its proponents than I would harbor if they were merely another entry in the list of costly mistakes committed by our technocrat rulers. It is precisely because they were wielded as a political weapon that they ought be scorned as one.
It's use as a political weapon became even more overt with vaccine mandates, which were used to punish if not outright purge political dissidents.
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The lockdowns and other measures - American and Euro alike - were unjustified by the threat, were ineffective, and violated various principles that should have been considered too important to throw overboard in a panic. They were obviously wrong in multiple ways, many of which were indeed obvious as soon as the lockdowns began, and some of which were obvious even beforehand.
Not obvious: Covid was largely harmless.
Obvious as soon as the measures started: Their implementation has more holes than substance and you may as well not bother.
Obvious from the get-go: Liberal societies shouldn't suspend civil liberties based on nebulous suspicions.
That these measures were kept up for years, kept coming back even when it was evident they weren't accomplishing anything other than damage, and that people were vilified for not going along is more than enough food for a very high level of anger.
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At some level of lethality, explicit lockdowns won't be necessary because everyone will be voluntarily staying home for fear of infection. At levels below that, lockdowns won't work because people won't follow them due to the risk of death being low. It's only when the lethality is unknown but plausibly high that lockdowns can be justified, but once the lethality is known you'll end up in one of the first two situations.
And even then, lockdowns would not be justified unless quarantining was impossible.
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Putting Belarus above Ukraine in 2020 in terms of human rights just due to Ukraine being influenced by Western COVID-policies, and implementing lockdowns, while Belarus' leader doing absolutely nothing and advising his people to drink vodka in order to protect themselves from COVID leads to some interesting paradoxes. You'll get African dictatorships above Denmark.
God created all people in his image, and your belief in God and your obligation before other human beings is not dependent on whatever left-wingers or establishment in your country do or say. I'm not religious, but I'm a moral universalist, and death of Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans is equally tragic. American right-wingers, who often emphasize their religiosity, do not consider suffering of people in Haiti, Russia, Ukraine, China, or wherever — explicitly. While I can understand the ignorance (often willful) of human suffering across the world, or in-group preference (after all, even the most altruistic people don't give their homes to refuges and homeless), or healthy egoism, that's different from saying "NOT. OUR. PROBLEM". Catturd2 is a piece of shit, but I still will have moral obligation to save him if I'll see him drowning. Radical in-group ethics is evil, but I understand that some people might disagree.
And yes, I donate much of my salary to charity, so I put my money where my mouth is.
It was noted by someone else downthread that the American right is not a monolith — and indeed, you have a lot of right-wing charities supporting people around the world. Even proselytizing in third-world countries, like Mormons do, is pro-social and universalist. I am speaking specifically about dissident-right America-first chronically online twitterati (some of them even recognize that. I remember how in early reporting on the Ukraine War Tucker, when he was still on Fox News, constantly said at the end of his segments about Ukraine something like: "Poor, poor Ukrainians! Those poor people!". Saying "Fuck Ukraine" can fly on Twitter, but not on television, I guess)
Interesting? Yes. Paradox? No. Tanzania did rank above Denmark for human rights in 2020. It's pretty hard to be worse for human rights than imprisoning everyone. I guess Pol Pot's omnicide attempts are clearly worse, to give at least one example?
I think my comments preferring places as far-flung as Sweden and Tanzania to my own country (and countrymen) should make it clear that I do take a universal approach.
The difference here is that I was metaphorically drowning and, worse than merely not being helped, the majority of people around me hoped I'd drown harder. There is a point at which charity becomes doormattery, and caring for people who overwhelmingly wanted to harm me is the latter.
I would donate more to charity if I felt there were charities that were reasonably working towards their goals. I was much more likely to donate to charities pre-2020, before most of them revealed themselves to be nigh-fraudulent by refusing to challe nge lockdowns. To provide an anecdote from when this place (or was it /r/slatestarcodex, don't quite remember) was back on reddit, we once had someone approach the subreddit soliciting donations for a charity that operates on a native american reservation to help with malnutrition. We quickly found out, after some questioning, that the cause of their economic plight was not just generic poverty, but that the government of the reservation had imposed lockdowns on it. The charity refused to challenge the actual cause of the malnutrition. Me and some other people basically said we'd donate to an org willing to help with the actual problem if such an org exists but the proposed charity ain't it.
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Uh... Why are you a single issue anti lockdown person? Was it really so horrible to be forced to be told what to do and stay at home more than usual?
The lockdowns were actually pretty great for me, personally - I could relocate to a much cheaper place while getting paid the same, without any pushback from the corporate overlords, because WFH became the norm. But I think the fact that this thing happened in America without any serious pushback is a horrible thing, and everybody complicit in it has my full personal disgust and hate.
Most of the hate for lockdowns just smacks of "I don't care if additional millions of old and vulnerable people had died, the virus wasn't dangerous to me personally and forcing me to conform and sacrifice is a great crime". There was reason for lockdowns and they saved lives, yet people on this site tend to deny that. Although, yes, the details of their implementations were often idiotic.
That's some vile bullshit. NY governor - and others - directly caused deaths of thousands by their policies of forced admittance of sick individuals in the nursing homes with healthy ones. But if I want to go to a beach - alone - and swim in the sea, I am killing the elderly. Elites dined in large luxurious companies, maskless - but if I go to a store, I can not buy anything beyond pre-approved list, because I am killing the elderly. Politicians called to go to the Chinatown and hug random people there because this would show I'm not racist, politicians condone mass riots smack in the middle of pandemic because "fighting racism is more important for public health" - but if I meet two friends for a glass of beer, I am killing the elderly. Screw that. I would consider accepting the baloney about "sacrifice" if the people who demand sacrifices from me behaved like they think it is serious. When they proudly stood maskless in front on masked servants, this is not "sacrifice" - this is showing that they are the patricians and we are the plebeians. When they closed down businesses, but had them private open for them on the down low - this is not "sacrifice", this is oppression. When they destroyed thousands of small businesses while "disappearing" tens of billions of dollars of "covid fund" - this is not "sacrifice", this is fraud.
No they did not. You can worship this idol however you want, you can believe that dances with tambоurinеs, sacrifice of chickens and wearing special religious garments and performing elaborate rituals is the only thing that keeps the world from collapse. That's you religion, and I won't say anything about it, it's between you and whatever gods or other entities you worship. But when you try to force me into your religion, when you deny all empiric evidence and logic in service of your religious dogma, and when you lay all the atrocities that fellows of your religion committed - at my feet, I have nothing to say but "screw that". Your attempt at emotional blackmail failed.
People on this site deny that too: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00461-0/fulltext
In other words, mandates help lowering infection rate among low-risk populations, but did nothing for high risk populations. In more mundane words, all this destruction and fascism was so we could have the cough a couple of months later than otherwise, with no change in outcome.
Oh, sorry, I forgot - true socialism has been never tried. Maybe next time.
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millions of old and vulnerable people did die and comparisons between places with lockdowns and not lockdowns (and varying levels of lockdowns) do not buttress the claim they reduced mortality even in that target group
someone sure is in denial of something, and it's the person who has to rely on an unsupported counterfactual of "sure millions of old and vulnerable people did die anyway, alone, cloistered off from their family, and not being taken care of by terrified medical staff as they drowned in their own fluid, and at an absurd cost in wealth and human rights violations, but more totally would have died without it"
once you account for those who died anyway and the enormous cost in wealth, lives, and rights violations, the lockdowns comes into focus as the stupidest public policy decision of the last 100 years and I hope each of you who supported such lunacy is constantly reminded of it like an albatross around their neck
and it wasn't only stupid in hindsight (it's preposterously stupid in hindsight), it was stupid at the time with relevant data and evidence at the time which was entirely ignored for reasons we're all left to speculate; Should we 1) use flu pandemic guidelines carefully crafted over 100 years in response to real world diseases or 2) throw those away and launch into a vastly costly global experiment with next to zero scientific support while refusing to engage in any sort of cost-benefit analysis whatsoever?
characterizing lockdowns as mere "conforming" and "forced to stay at home more than usual" is asininely dishonest
and stinks of someone whose cost for lockdowns was either near zero or positive
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That's the one great legacy of covid. It took that big exogenous shock to move the needle toward remote work. The viability of such work was mostly speculative before then.
A giant blow against an Office Space-style quality of life pain point.
Yes. I am seeing companies who didn't touch WFH with a ten-foot pole now opening remote positions. Once this happens, there's no stopping it - even if you ban WFH, people would just leave for a company that doesn't. Unless you pay fabulously well - which only a small percentage of companies does, and even for them it may be not fabulous enough to justify living in a place like San Francisco - you'd just get your market reduced, that's all. Only a total memetic blockade of WFH on the management level has been sustaining the "local only" model, but this has been broken and I don't think it's coming back. It can come back in certain companies, but not industry-wide.
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I had two small children with special education needs entering the education system right as the lockdowns started, and I’m more or less working class without the resources for private education and therapy, so naturally as the lockdowns went on I was filled with white hot nuclear rage at those responsible for them.
You ever seen a toddler do speech therapy with a mask on with masked adults?
Trust me when I say it’s one of the most frustrating, pointless exercises you could witness. Especially when it’s your kid.
That and the fact that my industry was completely devastated by the lockdowns as it was all in person work.
And I live in a heavily blue state.
So me and mine were absolutely the type of people sacrificed at the altar so that overweight, CNN addicted middle age office workers could have the perception of safety.
I can't believe how many lockdown supporters are still around.
The lockdowns...
Didn't work.
Had massive negative side effects.
Were an illegal imposition against personal rights.
This leaves just one weak pillar of support: "I personally benefited".
We recognize it's evil when a Halliburton exec benefits from a cruel and unnecessary war. It's also evil for people to support lockdowns because they personally came out ahead.
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The "pandemic" was a period in which many societies and governments dropped the mask on pluralism, burned the hitherto observed social contract, and stopped just short of putting guns to people's heads to tell them "do as we say or else", purely to force people into obedience for no good reason and many bad ones. And they stopped not because they came to their senses, but because the war in the Ukraine distracted them.
Seeing what petty tyranny lurks behind the thinning facade of supposedly liberal society can have a sobering effect.
It really was a mask off moment. We could see which people in power had principles (very few) vs. who was just playing team baseball (almost everyone).
Even the author of fucking "Manufacturing Consent" revealed himself to be more than willing to be a fascist if it was for the right team.
In my own personal life, I've learned to give people more charity and grace for having the wrong opinions. How could I do otherwise, when almost everyone fell under the spell? As for my friends who held firm against the tidal wave of bullshit I now have a much stronger connection and respect. It's like a secret club of people who you can really trust.
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I object to being falsely imprisoned.
Do you really even have to ask? Seriously, I don't understand how this can be so mysterious? What next, will you ask why Uyghurs don't like reeducation camps?
You were not imprisoned.
So there was no criminal penalties being threatened for me leaving a location? Strange. I seem to quite clearly remember the law saying exactly that.
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It is mysterious becuase it looks like you're grouping "reeducation camps" and "lockdowns" together on the basis on how legally similar they are - not on how horrible the experience is.
Lockdowns are not as bad as being on the business end of a genocide.
That being said, they were really, really bad. I would be prepared to forgive and forget if they were taught as a ‘never again’ moment and written into history books as the worst human rights violations in the modern west, Fauci and whitmer as unambiguous villains, and anti-lockdown activists as brave freedom fighters who admittedly believed some crazy things, but let’s not focus on that.
This is not how the establishments in western countries want to record things- lockdowns were some combination of a false memory, tragically necessary, and a mistake but not that bad. So yes, I’m still very angry about them, and it’s a perfectly justifiable degree of hyperbole above.
It makes sense to speak against lockdowns because they were actually harmful in ways you can describe, like the guy above with his children who couldn't do speech therapy with masks on, or because they were dumb and unproductive/counterproductive towards their stated goal. Or it makes sense to speak against the government for moving the goalposts and Fauci-ing it up.
Tophattingson on the other hand, the whole idea I get from his posts, is all about how they're bad because they're somewhat like imprisonment according to its dictionary definition, and imprisonment is against human rights as written by libertarians, and therefore they must be the Worst Evil Ever. I cannot help but associate this kind of legalesthetic thinking and tunnel vision with sovereign citizens.
Do you honestly believe they were the worst human rights violation, or is it just a condition for forgiving and forgetting?
I hate them for all the other reasons too. I simply add one more reason. I do not think it would be productive for me to drop hundreds of examples of specific lockdown harms though if you do want specific examples I can provide them.
We had norms against what happened in 2020 for a reason (if you think they were not norms, find me pre-2020 lockdown advocates). Arbitrary home imprisonment of the entire population is not a power that the public typically granted the state. It is not a power that a state can safely have access to. Even if they used it correctly in 2020 it would be dangerous, but the actual course of events demonstrates it's danger: A state powerful enough to imprison everyone is powerful enough to fabricate the reason why it's doing so. Evidence: They did it for covid. Because of this, there is no safe way to grant a state this power even if there's a hypothetical virus/pandemic/whatever that would warrant doing so.
That's the additional argument I present. Simply tallying up the costs of lockdowns vs the costs of covid creates the impression that there could be a good lockdown in the right circumstance. I disagree because I think the risks of a state that can do a lockdown are far greater than any benefit they could create, as demonstrated by what happened in 2020. The best schelling point to protect against this, and the one we used pre-2020, is to prohibit arbitrary imprisonment. I am distraught that we have since abandoned this protection.
Sovereign citizens believe they are following the law albeit it's a law that does not actually exist. They think there's magic legal cheat codes that let them ignore certain laws. I'm saying fuck the law if it's like this. Those are very different positions.
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Individually, no. Socially, hell yes, they were violation on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Not sure about human rights, but something was violated there.
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I mean they are exactly like imprisonment as currently practiced for minor-ish criminals -- enforced house arrest with allowances to leave under limited circumstances. If you think that being against arbitrary imprisonment is on the libertarian end of the spectrum that's fine I guess -- but I wonder where it puts you on the political compass?
I am against arbitrary imprisonment, it's just that we're using different definitions of "arbitrary". The word invokes "literally no correlation with any external reasons other than 'we said so'" to me, and to anti-lockdowners, I guess, "when they didn't ask our opinion"? "When it wasn't in response to anything I personally did"? Maybe you can clarify.
I find this whole rhetoric around it reminiscent of "taxation is theft", to which I respond "well then, I support organized theft that doesn't ruin the targets with redistribution towards societal needs and don't support targeted theft that sometimes ruins targets and only enriches the thief".
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Lockdowns were like imprisonment for me. Like a prolonged home arrest for no reason. Somehow it was very clear that they will be useless and the policies didn't even make sense.
Yes, they were the worst human rights violations in the western world since the war ended or something like that.
Only when you widen your comparison to places where wars and genocide still happens (Ukraine, other wars, Uigurs etc.), we can find examples with even worse violations.
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For a given definition of ‘modern’ and ‘west’, yes.
I don’t consider Serbia in the 90s western and don’t call the Holocaust modern in the sense I’m talking about.
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