One group is physically imposing its ideology on another, and they are asking why we have a few examples of people acting out? I think a better question would have been why have people taken it so well and not seen more pushback. Many jurisdictions in North America and elsewhere have essentially been living under occupation (sometimes by a majority) where people are being forcibly told how to live.
There are literally 10s of millions of people that disagree with what they are being forced to do, but go along with it. We should all be impressed (or horrified, as I am) that all we saw in the way of pushback was a bit of rudeness.
What's humorous to me about this is that both ideologies can probably make this claim. I know a lot of people who are pro-vaccine and mask mandates that are mad that this pandemic is still going on because of people believing misinformation and refusing to do their part. I know people who are anti-vaccine and anti-mask mandate who are mad that they are being "forced" to vaccinate (in effect, because of businesses adding requirements - the government itself is not forcing vaccination for the general public). Both would say the other side is causing their strife. Both are right, if you accept their axioms/premises (which I don't think is reasonable for both sides).
One side is doing whatever they can to force everyone to not only accept but live their views, impose their restrictions, and snatch up as much "emergency" power as legally possible. All because they see themselves as morally superior and more intelligent than the other side. They're the smarties "following the science".
And so now we find ourselves at the unceremonious end of this pandemic. One day we woke up and restrictions are gone. Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone. COVID is old news. Kinda strange, huh?
Regardless of which group an individual falls into, I believe all people intuitively know that this crisis was at best exaggerated and at worst manufactured, but absolutely exploited to the max. Now that the fear binge is over, we can see that arbitrary and ultimately unnecessary restrictions were imposed on us, how purchasing power has been eroded, countless choices and freedoms taken from them without any recourse.
We should all be mad and unruly. Something is deeply broken and wrong which allowed power hungry individuals to POINTLESSLY disrupt so many lives for so long.
> One day we woke up and restrictions are gone. Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone. COVID is old news. Kinda strange, huh?
Maybe in your bubble.
CDC guidance on masks and other preventative measures are data-driven, based on number of cases in the area, ICU utilization, and other metrics. You can see the guidance for your are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/covid-... Most places are low risk, meaning the guidance is to, "Wear a mask based on your personal preference, informed by your personal level of risk"
> Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone.
COVID-19 is still in the news. YouTube still has a section dedicated to it, it's still a "special coverage" section in Apple News and it's "front page" news on the New York Times. The President is still actively talking about COVID every day, and is pushing people to get their second boosters (that's fear mongering, right?).
Granted, Fox News hasn't published a covid article in a while.
Data driven, maybe. Myopic in focus? Absolutely. And it is that myopic obsession over Covid that took something bad and made it orders of magnitude worse.
> And it is that myopic obsession over Covid that took something bad and made it orders of magnitude worse.
A good number of my family and friends are healthcare workers. You get any set of them into a room and all they do is talk about how many people are dead/dying because they didn't get a vaccine.
So if by "myopic obsession" you mean, the myopic obsession with people not getting vaccinated because of some shortsighted views on relative risks you'd be right. ICUs were full of unvaccinated people who got covid, not vaccinated people who didn't.
What do you imagine all that "exploitation" was about? Which "power-hungry individuals" benefited, and how? Everyone ended up with loved ones sick and dead. The governors and mayors who implemented mandates did so knowing it would wreck their economies. Who would have benefited from exaggerating (or manufacturing) this crisis?
Nobody benefited from this crisis. Everybody was doing what they were incentivized to do. The problem is those incentives caused a massive overreaction with far reaching societal consequences.
The article mentions nurses in Missouri, a region where I have some first-hand knowledge.
Rural Missouri was locked down for... maybe a month? I guess more like 3 weeks. And nothing like the NYC or SF lockdowns, mind you. Masking was always optional, even when it was mandatory, and most people didn't. In many parts of Missouri, pandemic restrictions amounted to not much more than a couple months of remote learning and have been over close to 2 years at this point. I think we were even doing in person summer school in 2020.
But you still see the same level of rage. IMO a lot of it is intentionally manufactured. People really believe they're being forced to mask and get vaccinated even though they haven't been doing either since May 2020. It's utterly bizarre.
The stimulus checks mostly just feeding increased alcohol consumption didn't help, especially in a region where endemic and generational substance abuse problems are probably the strongest headwind.
I don't at all buy that the rage is "intentionally manufactured".
I also live in a rural area. The majority of the people here are conservative, see themselves as individual family units first and members of a community second. They understand how to operate mostly autonomously and have no need to hide in a crowd for comfort.
I understand that many people need the security of a strong authority when they are scared. But please understand that not all of us need some sacred decree from the State Capitol telling us when we can visit our grandparents or which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store and strongly resent that anyone thinks they have the authority to do so.
Of course, these people instinctively "rage" against anything that encroaches on their rights as individuals and they should. And now that is clear those decisions were mostly arbitrary and the people making them so obviously doing so because "woke" or just to consolidate power, I think they have a right to be angry.
The backlash should be interpreted as a warning that the populace was pushed too far. Too much power was seized using fear and people noticed.
> which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store
I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government?
And if I did manage to be correct there, that'd be capitalism at work. Customers could choose to do business with companies setting those rules. And if enough people voted with their wallets, stores wouldn't have those rules. The people I see "raging" about these things are the same ones I see promoting free markets and things like that.
Sure. And that's the free market at work. Those companies chose to take the actions they did.
As I said, the people raging about masks have a high correlation with people who talk about free markets, corporate rights, etc. It's the inconsistency that irks me here.
I went to a shop near the beginning of the pandemic that had a bunch of stickers splayed across the floor in a confusing array and an employee who was militantly yelling at confused people for standing on the wrong stickers. It was very off putting and I stopped going to that shop, preferring others that also had stickers on the floor but with clearer labels and calmer staff. I noticed that the first business was boarded up about 6 months ago.
I agree. My shopping habits did shift due to the pandemic. Some places suited my preferred variables more than others and I chose to give them my business instead of places I had been frequenting.
Between that and the supply chain issues I found a silver lining. There are several full size grocery stores and another dozen or so specialty markets within a couple of miles of me. And now I have a good sense of their relative pros & cons. These days I tune my shopping to optimize for my shopping list.
Missouri never had any rules about travel or super market isles (wait... did any state make laws or regulations about super market isles?!). I visited extended family throughout the spring of 2020 and I wasn't breaking any laws.
More importantly, MO's government is comprised of a conservative governor, a conservative super-majority in the legislature, and conservative courts, all of whom have been aggressively anti-lockdown, and any of whom could reasonably have authored your exact post. The only credible threat to conservatives in Missouri is from the right. Who exactly are these woke baddies in the state capitol?!
My fundamental point is a scientific observation. The only substantive claim you're making in your post that is related to the article is about the source of this rage. That claim is a good one because it is possible to test by running an experiment: put restrictions on one population but not another and determine if levels of rage are elevated in one or both communities.
Your assertion is empirically denied by the fact that people are still enraged at elevated levels even places where these restrictions never existed, or existed for trivial treatment periods several years ago.
The rest of your post sort of reaffirms my belief in my hypothesis.
For example, in God's name, what role does wokeness play in this discussion other than to serve as an associated angry-tickles trigger word?
You managed to blame an aggressively anti-lockdown state government for restrictions that literally never existed and then went on an entirely unrelated rant about wokeness in your first post on this topic -- unprovoked and apropos of absolutely nothing in the article or the comment section.
This reiterates my belief that the rage is manufactured and that propaganda is a likely root cause for the state of the public's mental health. Just keep throwing all those angry words in the angry word soup.
Angry trigger words associate. It's all related by cortisol and negative emotions; the substance of the conversation doesn't matter. Just be angry at all the baddie stuff. The more the better.
(BTW, I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate the link between stimulus checks and substance abuse, which is apparently less fun to think about than wokeness or whatever trigger word, but is definitely an important root cause for increased rage levels.)
>I don't at all buy that the rage is "intentionally manufactured".
I disagree. I think some of the outrage is "artificially" inflamed by our connectedness and some is intentionally inflamed.
I say the outrage is "artificial" because, people would be a lot less polarized if their only information on the topic was their personal experiences, but they were already primed by many stories about the worst offenders from the opposite group. For example, when they actually interact with a someone who is adamantly for or against masks in real life, they are already angry and fed up from reading stories online.
On the intentional side, political groups and MSM absolutely played up the divisiveness for their own benefit. Politicians used it to smear their opposition, and companies used it to drive clicks.
This polarized, divided, and radicalized communities and made it very difficult for them make reasonable compromises on acceptable behavior
Coming from a rural, conservative farm community in Australia — which seems quite culturally compatible with your own as you describe it — I beg to differ.
The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach:
Shut. TF. Borders.
Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria.
IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed.
> The majority of the people here are conservative
Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear.
For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”.
From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites.
> Many jurisdiction in North America and elsewhere have essentially been living under occupation
Oh give me a break. Nobody is under occupation, there’s just a subset of the population who believe that they don’t owe anything to anyone under any circumstances and would rather watch people suffer rather than wear a piece of fabric because they’re mouth breathers with terrible fitness.
No what’s part of the problem are people claiming their lives are ruined by a mask. Extremely interesting to see how their talking points immediately were silenced when real hardship, like Ukrainians being invaded by Russia, started to hit the news cycle.
Selfish, entitled, without a care for their community or fellow man.
Oh and my comment was heavily upvoted before it was flagged, so keep reporting my stuff anti-vaxxers. You aren’t on the right side of history.
Not really. When the dust settles and we see the fallout caused myopic decision making by a small handful of "experts" it ain't gonna be pretty. The pandemic was real. People did die. But that doesn't mean any of what we did was right. I'd say we did virtually every single thing wrong. These "expert" scared the living daylights out of people instead of attempted to calm them. They downplayed any bit of good news (eg: the IFR for covid is way, way less than what the original models said). They promoted a culture of shaming and vitriol. They cheered on the absolute fuckage of our children by closing their schools for more than a year and then making them play safety theater when they returned. They intentionally stifled debates about what we were doing--god help anybody who questioned anything about what we've done.
Oh yeah, and they mandated crap like masks. Which did nothing real and just divided people even more. 50 years from now we are gonna laugh at how stupid humans were for wearing masks in the olympics. Dudes just got done going down the hill on their snowboard in the freezing cold and then they have to wear some giant honking mask on their face--despite them being fully vaccinated and constantly tested. It's modern rain-dances....
The whole thing is pure insanity and history will not look at what we did with any kind of positive light.
Masks work. I haven't even had a head cold in 2 years, and I'm not alone in that. This feels like when Windows advocates say something about how Linux doesn't do X or is slow doing X, and it's just wrong. Personal experience says exactly the opposite.
Saying that masks did nothing real makes everything else you wrote suspect.
> Extremely interesting to see how their talking points immediately were silenced when real hardship, like Ukrainians being invaded by Russia, started to hit the news cycle.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is, because it literally is just the TV-fed mainstream talking point for the "I support the current thing" crowd.
I live in North America and this is news to me. In recent years there are new requirements, surely. Mostly, but not entirely, they have a rational basis. Then again, I’m old and I’ve seen worse so maybe it’s a matter of perspective. But maybe I’m missing some larger and more specific point.
For me it was a shock to see the power the state had or at least claimed to have over my life.
The most egregious claim was that for a period of time it was illegal to voluntarily associate with others in their private residence for a completely consensual encounter.
Most law enforcement agencies and many individuals ignored this policy, but the fact that the governor claimed the authority for such a restriction still infuriates me.
This statement is misleading at best. The closest we got were restrictions of 10+ people. Everyone in this country throughout the pandemic you could have associated with a smaller group in your private residence.
The California shelter in place mandate on December 5th, 2020 [1] prohibited all recreational interactions with others outside your household. It applied to both indoor and outdoor gatherings of any number of people. It made it illegal to walk with a friend in a park, or visit a lover in their home.
a. All gatherings with members of other households are prohibited in the Region
except as expressly permitted herein.
b. All individuals living in the Region shall stay home or at their place of
residence except as necessary to conduct activities associated with the
operation, maintenance, or usage of critical infrastructure,
as required by law, or as specifically permitted in this order.
h. Nothing in this Order prevents any number of persons from the same
household from leaving their residence, lodging, or temporary
accommodation, as long as they do not engage in any interaction with (or
otherwise gather with) any number of persons from any other household,
except as specifically permitted herein
As I recall, there was more than a little glee at the time on the part of conservatives at the idea of a "gay disease" which delayed and weakened the government response:
It wasn't just the claims of power. It was the claims of power to impose rules that were ignored by those doing the imposing. How many officials imposed mask mandates and then were seen in public unmasked? How many imposed travel bans, and then went on vacation out of state? How much do they think they can rub their hypocrisy in the face of the public before people get angry?
Then there was the legal over-reach. This isn't a dictatorship; it's the rule of law. People in power don't get to just issue orders; they have to have the authority to issue those orders. A lot of people giving orders didn't seem to care. Worse, they didn't even seem to understand the concept of limited government. They just acted like they could order whatever they wanted. Well, in a country where a fair number of people actually care about freedom and limited government, of course there's going to be pushback.
More precisely, a shock to see how little power you have over your life. In America you are brainwashed to believe otherwise, mostly so you exercise this 'power' with your credit card
People still almost all the actual power. They voluntarily give most of it up. The state is relatively impotent and can only make an example of a few people at a time.
> the governor claimed the authority for such a restriction
It is interesting that both the legislature and the voters seemed largely willing to accept government by executive order (and sometimes bizarre orders as you note) for much of the pandemic.
Let's be honest, your statement of "For me it was a shock to see the power the state had or at least claimed to have over my life." can apply to all of our politicians of both parties at every level.
For me, I think the apt shock comparison would be if I were gay and a state was putting new sodomy laws on the the books. Of course government overreach is more eye opening when you realize you are the receiving end of it.
I think the criticism can be leveled at both parties for different issues. That said, I think it is defeatist to simply say all politicians are the same. Parties perform differently on different issues, and some politicians perform better across multiple issues.
Imagine being so confident in your ideology that you must assume that anyone who disagrees is an agent of a foreign power, set to subvert your way of life.
Nobody can look at the data and come to another conclusion. Impossible. Must be Russia, the CIA told me so.
Ideology? There is no ideology behind trying to save lives and protect society.
However, there is ideology in pretending that you don't live in a society, in thinking you can somehow do as you please. Not a pleasant ideology.
Luckily, as you have pointed out, the most that these ideologues can muster is throwing their toys out of the pram when asked simple requests. (and posting absurd comments on social media if course).
>Ideology? There is no ideology behind trying to save lives and protect society.
Of course there is.
Ideology: a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
You just stated that we should try to save lives and protect society, and implicitly, that it is worth the cost is. The fact that you hold this view doesn't mean it isn't an ideology.
Disagree with things like wearing a mask so you don’t breathe plague on other people?
There’s difference of opinion and there’s willfully ignorant stupidity.
There was a plague in China at the border of Mongolia in the 1920s it was airborne and close to 100% lethal. Several doctors refused to mask. They contracted the disease and died. Since then it has been accepted by the medical community that masking prevents transmission of airborne disease. That’s why surgeons wear masks, to protect the patients.
Pushback against medically and scientifically accepted measures to protect public health is idiocy. Next you’re going to argue that asking you to wash your hands after you shit is a violation of your rights.
The pandemic upended many people's lives - people have lost loved ones, lost jobs, been isolated for too long, folks who contracted the virus have effects of long-covid.
It does not appear to be peer reviewed. They are economists not epidemiologists. Only one of three are associated with JH and JH did not endorse the study.
> "It's a controversial and important topic that the public needs to let play out in the academic research, because obviously as a non-economist it will be very difficult to read this study and say, "Oh yes, the methods and the research is valid," Stubblefield said.
And another notes that "This contradicts a University of Oxford study which estimated the lockdowns saved 3-million lives in Europe."
Christ, this misrepresentation once again. All y’all need to get caught up: that is not a John Hopkins have study, the researchers are not epidemiologists they’re g.d. economists, the thing is not peer-reviewed, and it does not support your claim. Quit being a sucker propaganda that encourages you to get sick.
Good article. I would just ask that anyone reading this to please look upon your fellow man with empathy, understanding and maybe even love. Through the last 2 years everyone was propagandized into fear, violence and even death and some actions could be said to be a primal fight or flight response.
Now turn and look to the media, corporations and government who did everything in their power to divide the populace and pit the citizenry against each other. While simultaneously amassing wealth and power in a equal amount that the populace lost.
Take a moment to consider everything that happened (maybe a long moment, there was a lot) and realize who the true enemy is and never forget. This certainly won’t be the last enormous overreach and removal of rights.
> Some of the antisocial behavior Americans are seeing will resolve itself as the pandemic loosens its grip. In most of the country, masks are coming off, people are resuming normal gatherings, and kids have returned to school.
Doubt.
Things have been "normal" here for a while and people are still fucking assholes. Being an asshole seems to bring more benefits that punishments, so I imagine people are going to continue to be assholes for a while.
Care to make a few predictions about what the political and cultural fallout will be? Because I can easily see a particular political party going full on authoritarian, but claiming "patriotism" and "constitutionality".
> Because I can easily see a particular political party going full on authoritarian, but claiming "patriotism" and "constitutionality".
One party spent the last two years going full-bore authoritarian in the name of "safety" and "saving lives". They cheered on closing beaches, hiking trails, basketball courts, schools, churches, boat launches, hockey rinks, playgrounds, parks, campgrounds, public restrooms, drinking fountains, you name it. They cheered on police arresting people who attempted to do those things. The cheered when schools were closed for more than a year, leaving those in the lowest socioeconomic groups completely screwed. They cheered when massive amounts of wealth got transferred from the working class and underprivileged to the upper class tech workers and beyond. They cheered on closing small mom & pop businesses and cheered on everybody ordering all their shit from amazon.
Said party claimed to be backed by "science and data" but took dramatic actions that were backed by neither.
The political party I used to belong to betrayed me. They tossed every single thing they claimed to value right out the window. All political parties are hot garbage. The best you can hope for is both parties having enough sway to balance out the extremes of either one. It took the last two years to wake me up to that. Never fall in love with a political party... It's not "us vs. them" it's just "us".
Covid is not the only cause of this, even before covid people were more and more behaving as stupid pricks to one another, and slowly the thin masks of civility are vanishing.
Coming decade will be more rude, violent, repressing, arrogant and deadly than the ones we just went through.
Why? economical divide, lack of solidarity, grand theft by elites, solutions by fascists and religious scum.
This all causes stress far beyond what the pandemic has been dishing out, and thus lots of people, especially economical and social marginalized ones are losing it.
The shit that went down in Italy—a country with an excellent healthcare system—seems to have been completely forgotten, perhaps as some sort of self-protective defence against acknowledging the threat this new virus posed and, given the damage we’re seeing to people who were previously healthy, quite frankly still poses.
>>The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed.
I find that the rise in suicide and depression caused by the isolation of the pandemic are simply being filed under the "failed people" statistic a little offensive
Perhaps missing the obvious, which is that a lot of people did get sick or die due to covid, and quite a number seem to have persistent symptoms after the fact. It would be odd if that didn't lead to stress.
I'm a bit doubtful on the social isolation explanation, simply because we have a control. Some places never really locked down, or did so for a very short time span.
Now picture them wielding unlimited censorship, canceling whomever disagrees with their values, labeling whomever they want "domestic terrorists" and all the other powers that liberals have grown so fond of and abused the past few years.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadThere are literally 10s of millions of people that disagree with what they are being forced to do, but go along with it. We should all be impressed (or horrified, as I am) that all we saw in the way of pushback was a bit of rudeness.
And so now we find ourselves at the unceremonious end of this pandemic. One day we woke up and restrictions are gone. Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone. COVID is old news. Kinda strange, huh?
Regardless of which group an individual falls into, I believe all people intuitively know that this crisis was at best exaggerated and at worst manufactured, but absolutely exploited to the max. Now that the fear binge is over, we can see that arbitrary and ultimately unnecessary restrictions were imposed on us, how purchasing power has been eroded, countless choices and freedoms taken from them without any recourse.
We should all be mad and unruly. Something is deeply broken and wrong which allowed power hungry individuals to POINTLESSLY disrupt so many lives for so long.
Maybe in your bubble.
CDC guidance on masks and other preventative measures are data-driven, based on number of cases in the area, ICU utilization, and other metrics. You can see the guidance for your are here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/covid-... Most places are low risk, meaning the guidance is to, "Wear a mask based on your personal preference, informed by your personal level of risk"
> Fear mongering by the media and our government is gone.
COVID-19 is still in the news. YouTube still has a section dedicated to it, it's still a "special coverage" section in Apple News and it's "front page" news on the New York Times. The President is still actively talking about COVID every day, and is pushing people to get their second boosters (that's fear mongering, right?).
Granted, Fox News hasn't published a covid article in a while.
A good number of my family and friends are healthcare workers. You get any set of them into a room and all they do is talk about how many people are dead/dying because they didn't get a vaccine.
So if by "myopic obsession" you mean, the myopic obsession with people not getting vaccinated because of some shortsighted views on relative risks you'd be right. ICUs were full of unvaccinated people who got covid, not vaccinated people who didn't.
Rural Missouri was locked down for... maybe a month? I guess more like 3 weeks. And nothing like the NYC or SF lockdowns, mind you. Masking was always optional, even when it was mandatory, and most people didn't. In many parts of Missouri, pandemic restrictions amounted to not much more than a couple months of remote learning and have been over close to 2 years at this point. I think we were even doing in person summer school in 2020.
But you still see the same level of rage. IMO a lot of it is intentionally manufactured. People really believe they're being forced to mask and get vaccinated even though they haven't been doing either since May 2020. It's utterly bizarre.
The stimulus checks mostly just feeding increased alcohol consumption didn't help, especially in a region where endemic and generational substance abuse problems are probably the strongest headwind.
I also live in a rural area. The majority of the people here are conservative, see themselves as individual family units first and members of a community second. They understand how to operate mostly autonomously and have no need to hide in a crowd for comfort.
I understand that many people need the security of a strong authority when they are scared. But please understand that not all of us need some sacred decree from the State Capitol telling us when we can visit our grandparents or which direction we should walk down the aisle in the grocery store and strongly resent that anyone thinks they have the authority to do so.
Of course, these people instinctively "rage" against anything that encroaches on their rights as individuals and they should. And now that is clear those decisions were mostly arbitrary and the people making them so obviously doing so because "woke" or just to consolidate power, I think they have a right to be angry.
The backlash should be interpreted as a warning that the populace was pushed too far. Too much power was seized using fear and people noticed.
I could be wrong, but wasn't this the stores setting those rules and not the central government?
And if I did manage to be correct there, that'd be capitalism at work. Customers could choose to do business with companies setting those rules. And if enough people voted with their wallets, stores wouldn't have those rules. The people I see "raging" about these things are the same ones I see promoting free markets and things like that.
If I was incorrect, well, ignore me.
The majority of those stores were reacting to the hysteria and outright propaganda being pushed by the political class and their allies in the media.
Do you not remember the cries of "You're killing grandma" and the "naming and shaming" for questioning the orthodoxy promogulated by Fauci et al?
As I said, the people raging about masks have a high correlation with people who talk about free markets, corporate rights, etc. It's the inconsistency that irks me here.
Between that and the supply chain issues I found a silver lining. There are several full size grocery stores and another dozen or so specialty markets within a couple of miles of me. And now I have a good sense of their relative pros & cons. These days I tune my shopping to optimize for my shopping list.
Missouri never had any rules about travel or super market isles (wait... did any state make laws or regulations about super market isles?!). I visited extended family throughout the spring of 2020 and I wasn't breaking any laws.
More importantly, MO's government is comprised of a conservative governor, a conservative super-majority in the legislature, and conservative courts, all of whom have been aggressively anti-lockdown, and any of whom could reasonably have authored your exact post. The only credible threat to conservatives in Missouri is from the right. Who exactly are these woke baddies in the state capitol?!
My fundamental point is a scientific observation. The only substantive claim you're making in your post that is related to the article is about the source of this rage. That claim is a good one because it is possible to test by running an experiment: put restrictions on one population but not another and determine if levels of rage are elevated in one or both communities.
Your assertion is empirically denied by the fact that people are still enraged at elevated levels even places where these restrictions never existed, or existed for trivial treatment periods several years ago.
The rest of your post sort of reaffirms my belief in my hypothesis.
For example, in God's name, what role does wokeness play in this discussion other than to serve as an associated angry-tickles trigger word?
You managed to blame an aggressively anti-lockdown state government for restrictions that literally never existed and then went on an entirely unrelated rant about wokeness in your first post on this topic -- unprovoked and apropos of absolutely nothing in the article or the comment section.
This reiterates my belief that the rage is manufactured and that propaganda is a likely root cause for the state of the public's mental health. Just keep throwing all those angry words in the angry word soup.
Angry trigger words associate. It's all related by cortisol and negative emotions; the substance of the conversation doesn't matter. Just be angry at all the baddie stuff. The more the better.
(BTW, I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate the link between stimulus checks and substance abuse, which is apparently less fun to think about than wokeness or whatever trigger word, but is definitely an important root cause for increased rage levels.)
I disagree. I think some of the outrage is "artificially" inflamed by our connectedness and some is intentionally inflamed.
I say the outrage is "artificial" because, people would be a lot less polarized if their only information on the topic was their personal experiences, but they were already primed by many stories about the worst offenders from the opposite group. For example, when they actually interact with a someone who is adamantly for or against masks in real life, they are already angry and fed up from reading stories online.
On the intentional side, political groups and MSM absolutely played up the divisiveness for their own benefit. Politicians used it to smear their opposition, and companies used it to drive clicks.
This polarized, divided, and radicalized communities and made it very difficult for them make reasonable compromises on acceptable behavior
The case of Australia (and New Zealand) conclusively demonstrates it was in all ways feasible to eradicate at minimum the early Alpha strain of Covid with a relatively low-tech, low-effort approach:
Shut. TF. Borders.
Had America simply paid people to _stay home_, and closed its borders — all of them, international, interstate and even intra-state where necessary — they would’ve entirely halted the spread of Covid early on, sparing countless lives and curbing untold amounts of general insanity and hysteria.
IIRC the longest consecutive lockdown in Australia lasted just under four months. Said lockdown applied only to a single major international city of 5 million. Rural areas essentially got away from all forms of lockdown unscathed.
> The majority of the people here are conservative
Strong borders and border security are traditionally conservative values, or so I hear.
For instance, you’d be wrong if you thought an 80 year old couple living off the land they’ve been farming for decades would be in support of opening the borders out of some sense of duty to the word “freedom”.
From the Australian rural conservative perspective, the only people who stood to gain more freedom in a situation where Covid had been eradicated thanks to closed borders were cosmopolitan travelers and urbanites.
Oh give me a break. Nobody is under occupation, there’s just a subset of the population who believe that they don’t owe anything to anyone under any circumstances and would rather watch people suffer rather than wear a piece of fabric because they’re mouth breathers with terrible fitness.
Selfish, entitled, without a care for their community or fellow man.
Oh and my comment was heavily upvoted before it was flagged, so keep reporting my stuff anti-vaxxers. You aren’t on the right side of history.
And I could say the exact same thing of you.
Oh yeah, and they mandated crap like masks. Which did nothing real and just divided people even more. 50 years from now we are gonna laugh at how stupid humans were for wearing masks in the olympics. Dudes just got done going down the hill on their snowboard in the freezing cold and then they have to wear some giant honking mask on their face--despite them being fully vaccinated and constantly tested. It's modern rain-dances....
The whole thing is pure insanity and history will not look at what we did with any kind of positive light.
Saying that masks did nothing real makes everything else you wrote suspect.
Let's see, masks work against rhinovirus, influenza virus, and they magically don't work for (also respiratory) COVID? Doubt it.
What possible evidence do you have for this "all had COVID" assertion? The biggest estimate I could find was 140 million in the USA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/02/28/covid-cases...
This isn't the gotcha you think it is, because it literally is just the TV-fed mainstream talking point for the "I support the current thing" crowd.
The most egregious claim was that for a period of time it was illegal to voluntarily associate with others in their private residence for a completely consensual encounter.
Most law enforcement agencies and many individuals ignored this policy, but the fact that the governor claimed the authority for such a restriction still infuriates me.
a. All gatherings with members of other households are prohibited in the Region except as expressly permitted herein.
b. All individuals living in the Region shall stay home or at their place of residence except as necessary to conduct activities associated with the operation, maintenance, or usage of critical infrastructure, as required by law, or as specifically permitted in this order.
h. Nothing in this Order prevents any number of persons from the same household from leaving their residence, lodging, or temporary accommodation, as long as they do not engage in any interaction with (or otherwise gather with) any number of persons from any other household, except as specifically permitted herein
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/12.3.20-St...
Sodomy laws were finally ruled unconstitutional in 2003, nullifying the laws still on the books in the remaining states:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_St...
Interesting to think that of what covid response rhetoric would look like applied to the aids epidemic.
EG we don't let possible disease spreaders eat together, so why would we let to consenting adult vectors have sex.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/full-st...
Then there was the legal over-reach. This isn't a dictatorship; it's the rule of law. People in power don't get to just issue orders; they have to have the authority to issue those orders. A lot of people giving orders didn't seem to care. Worse, they didn't even seem to understand the concept of limited government. They just acted like they could order whatever they wanted. Well, in a country where a fair number of people actually care about freedom and limited government, of course there's going to be pushback.
People still almost all the actual power. They voluntarily give most of it up. The state is relatively impotent and can only make an example of a few people at a time.
It is interesting that both the legislature and the voters seemed largely willing to accept government by executive order (and sometimes bizarre orders as you note) for much of the pandemic.
Let's be honest, your statement of "For me it was a shock to see the power the state had or at least claimed to have over my life." can apply to all of our politicians of both parties at every level.
I think the criticism can be leveled at both parties for different issues. That said, I think it is defeatist to simply say all politicians are the same. Parties perform differently on different issues, and some politicians perform better across multiple issues.
Nobody can look at the data and come to another conclusion. Impossible. Must be Russia, the CIA told me so.
https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/
However, there is ideology in pretending that you don't live in a society, in thinking you can somehow do as you please. Not a pleasant ideology.
Luckily, as you have pointed out, the most that these ideologues can muster is throwing their toys out of the pram when asked simple requests. (and posting absurd comments on social media if course).
Of course there is.
Ideology: a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.
You just stated that we should try to save lives and protect society, and implicitly, that it is worth the cost is. The fact that you hold this view doesn't mean it isn't an ideology.
Pushback against medically and scientifically accepted measures to protect public health is idiocy. Next you’re going to argue that asking you to wash your hands after you shit is a violation of your rights.
https://weartv.com/amp/news/local/study-from-johns-hopkins-u...
It does not appear to be peer reviewed. They are economists not epidemiologists. Only one of three are associated with JH and JH did not endorse the study.
https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/claims-johns-hopkins-...
> "It's a controversial and important topic that the public needs to let play out in the academic research, because obviously as a non-economist it will be very difficult to read this study and say, "Oh yes, the methods and the research is valid," Stubblefield said.
And another notes that "This contradicts a University of Oxford study which estimated the lockdowns saved 3-million lives in Europe."
Now turn and look to the media, corporations and government who did everything in their power to divide the populace and pit the citizenry against each other. While simultaneously amassing wealth and power in a equal amount that the populace lost.
Take a moment to consider everything that happened (maybe a long moment, there was a lot) and realize who the true enemy is and never forget. This certainly won’t be the last enormous overreach and removal of rights.
United we stand, divided we fall.
Doubt.
Things have been "normal" here for a while and people are still fucking assholes. Being an asshole seems to bring more benefits that punishments, so I imagine people are going to continue to be assholes for a while.
I expect we will see long term political and cultural fallout for the way individual autonomy was steamrolled.
A decrease in rights of all kinds as both parties expand the scope of government into regulating personal lives and choices.
Fiercer competition and extremism as everyone has more to loose depending on who is in power (because of fewer rights and increased scope).
More people will feel that they do not consent to the social contract and view the government as illegitimate, if not hostile to them.
One party spent the last two years going full-bore authoritarian in the name of "safety" and "saving lives". They cheered on closing beaches, hiking trails, basketball courts, schools, churches, boat launches, hockey rinks, playgrounds, parks, campgrounds, public restrooms, drinking fountains, you name it. They cheered on police arresting people who attempted to do those things. The cheered when schools were closed for more than a year, leaving those in the lowest socioeconomic groups completely screwed. They cheered when massive amounts of wealth got transferred from the working class and underprivileged to the upper class tech workers and beyond. They cheered on closing small mom & pop businesses and cheered on everybody ordering all their shit from amazon.
Said party claimed to be backed by "science and data" but took dramatic actions that were backed by neither.
The political party I used to belong to betrayed me. They tossed every single thing they claimed to value right out the window. All political parties are hot garbage. The best you can hope for is both parties having enough sway to balance out the extremes of either one. It took the last two years to wake me up to that. Never fall in love with a political party... It's not "us vs. them" it's just "us".
Whistling past the graveyard as it were.
I find that the rise in suicide and depression caused by the isolation of the pandemic are simply being filed under the "failed people" statistic a little offensive
I'm a bit doubtful on the social isolation explanation, simply because we have a control. Some places never really locked down, or did so for a very short time span.