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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".
Arbitrary imprisonment is defined by imprisoning people who have not committed or are not suspected of committing a crime. This is because totalitarian regimes can always present a reason to imprison someone that correlates with an external reason. They are a political dissident, they disagree with the government, they are nebulously dangerous etc. The problem is that these reasonings are illegitimate deployments of the state's power, clearly being used only to perpetuate it's power rather than for the purposes we allow the state to imprison people (some combination of protect/rehabilitation/justice for victims).
Lockdowns are still this to me. There was no correlation with any external reason. There was no evidence base for lockdowns prior to them being carried out. There is still no evidence base for lockdowns. Therefore I do not believe states did lockdowns for the reason they claimed they did so.
The majority of non-libertarian conceptions of the state, and even many libertarian ones, view legitimate states as a transaction. We give up some things in return for an organisation that will, ultimately, serve us in return. Taxes are expected to pay for services from the government, not simply fatten the president's wallet (that we specifically call the latter corruption or embezzlement should hint at that). Police are expected to protect civilians from criminals, not protect the government from disagreement. Prisons are expected to house criminals, not political opponents.
In 2019, someone who doesn't want the government to put everyone under house arrest on a dubious whim was called a person. In 2020, they're called a libertarian.
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This one -- imprisoning people for something that they might do (with no evidence that they will) was the stuff of dystopic movies until 2020. (and not at all the same as traditional quarantines, before you trot that one out)
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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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