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I think the “Western dogma” we’re getting at is the harm principle, usually stated as some version of “everyone should be able to do what they want unless it harms someone else.” There’s a sort of libertarian economist-type philosophy wherein everybody should be able to do whatever they want, and the government should just calculate the externality generated by each person’s actions and tax/fine them appropriately. “Garnish the unvaccinated’s wages “ sounds like a version of that, which is actually extremely compatible with the harm principle-based “Western dogma.”
The widely-acknowledged problem with the harm principle, practically speaking, is that everybody is constantly causing various harms to others that are essentially impossible to enumerate, let alone quantify and convert to a dollar figure to be fined or taxed. The less-talked-about problem is that the harm principle doesn’t account for politics; the obvious solution in this framework to carbon emissions, for instance, is a carbon tax. But carbon taxes are generally extremely unpopular, so democratic governments can’t really tax carbon as much as the externalities would dictate.
Putting aside policy for a moment, I agree with the idea that individualism as an ethic has gotten way out of hand, and that’s made us peculiarly ill-suited to addressing the pandemic, or climate change, or any of the other big issues threatening massive human cost up up and including societal collapse. When the facts indicate we must all make difficult sacrifices for the common good, people simply choose to ignore or disbelieve those facts. But fantasizing about seizing authoritarian control and forcing everyone to do what you think they should do strikes me as, at best, unhelpful escapism. The “at worst” scenarios for that kind of talk are pretty graphic, and probably don’t require elaboration at present.
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Whenever I read Mohdoo's posts I immediately remind myself that the Spanish Flu killed maybe 5%~ of the entire world's population and COVID-19 has killed far less than 0.1% of the world's population. I also remember that the large majority of people that die from COVID-19 are past the age of 65 which is longer than the life expectancy for 99.99%+ of the time our species has existed on this planet. Of all the problems humanity has ever faced this is the one that you think calls for totalitarianism and banishing your fellow man to the ocean for not falling in line? Mohdoo, do you think there is a chance that 50 years from now you will look back and be embarrassed for supporting these ideas?
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I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of something like tax incentives for vaccination. There’s implementation challenges I don’t have immediate answers to but they don’t seem insurmountable and lots of tax incentives and credits already exist for other behaviors viewed as societally beneficial. The only issue I have no answer to is how you actually pass it. At present our political system is very nearly incapable of passing anything, at least at the national level.
But if the only options are “do nothing” or “revoke the citizenship of unvaccinated people, put them all on boats and say ‘fend for yourselves’,” I unequivocally choose the former. I don’t find “well we can’t do nothing” an especially persuasive argument for doing terrible things.
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On August 28 2021 07:11 BlackJack wrote:
Whenever I read Mohdoo's posts I immediately remind myself that the Spanish Flu killed maybe 5%~ of the entire world's population and COVID-19 has killed far less than 0.1% of the world's population. I also remember that the large majority of people that die from COVID-19 are past the age of 65 which is longer than the life expectancy for 99.99%+ of the time our species has existed on this planet. Of all the problems humanity has ever faced this is the one that you think calls for totalitarianism and banishing your fellow man to the ocean for not falling in line? Mohdoo, do you think there is a chance that 50 years from now you will look back and be embarrassed for supporting these ideas?
I think 0.001% is too many. I think that when our society maintains a certain quality of life, but lets those people die, it means the quality of life we were given was more than it should have been. Similar to the idea that a society is only as rich as their poorest citizen, I think we essentially have more than people deserve because the freedoms people have end up causing a really crazy amount of people to die. There are of course questions of "well then where do you draw the line?". I draw that line at preventable, transmittable disease. I think that should be our minimum. Not interested in slippery slope type of arguments. Just saying as it pertains to this, we should do better.
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3 million Americans are at risk of eviction. Many cities already have problems dealing with the homeless. Seems like this could be a real crisis that may be left to the states and counties to handle as they will.
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.001% of the population dying is too many, but rounding up, what, 30% of the population and forcing them into boats with no plans for their survival is acceptable? We can’t send them to other countries because it would be illegal, but we can revoke their citizenship and deport them for no crime whatsoever? This is standard cult of action stuff: mostly understandable dissatisfaction with the state of the world leads to fantasizing about using authoritarian power to bulldoze over any obstacles to “solving the problems,” with very little thought given to the practicality or even internal consistency of the “solutions.” No time for that, we have to ACT!
It’s fantasy for a few reasons. The easiest is that having sufficient power to enact solutions is one of the biggest problems and you’re just wishing that away. Unless you have a plan for *obtaining* dictatorial power, you’re not trading impractical ideals for pragmatism, you’re trading them for equally impractical but morally bankrupt power fantasies.
But more fundamentally, it’s fantasy to think that our problems are actually easy, if we could just get enough power to enact our will. They’re not. Dictatorships aren’t more efficient, partly because the power is never actually absolute, and partly because even absolute power doesn’t make it any easier to actually know what the best course is. We can tell ourselves “all our problems would be easy if it weren’t for those damn [in this case, I guess anti-vaxxers],” but it’s mostly just a comforting lie.
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On August 28 2021 08:14 Starlightsun wrote:3 million Americans are at risk of eviction. Many cities already have problems dealing with the homeless. Seems like this could be a real crisis that may be left to the states and counties to handle as they will.
Yeah there’s no real way this is going to have Congresses attention and I highly doubt Manchin or Sinema or their sick ilk would pass something that extended the moratorium anyways.
The Democrats method of handling COVID at this point just sucks. Pandemics not over no matter how much they might want to pretend it is.
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On August 28 2021 10:05 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On August 28 2021 09:51 Zambrah wrote:On August 28 2021 08:14 Starlightsun wrote:3 million Americans are at risk of eviction. Many cities already have problems dealing with the homeless. Seems like this could be a real crisis that may be left to the states and counties to handle as they will. Yeah there’s no real way this is going to have Congresses attention and I highly doubt Manchin or Sinema or their sick ilk would pass something that extended the moratorium anyways. The Democrats method of handling COVID at this point just sucks. Pandemics not over no matter how much they might want to pretend it is. Im confused by your last sentence. How does the supreme court overuling (with rep appointed judges) bidens order mean the dems are pretending its over? Dems are not following the science completely. But it is a clear and exponential differnce between how the two parties are treating covid. There is one party ranging from pretending its over to it never happened, and that is not the dems.
They’ve insisted that there will be no more lockdowns and are generally letting a lot of the COVID freezes on things like student loans lapse.
Their actions read a lot like trying to return to normal so they can look like they solved COVID for the midterms to my deeply cynical self.
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A vaccine supply doesn’t matter much if people aren’t getting vaccinated and causing serious clogging of the hospital system though, the Delta variant warrants another month lockdown to help stop the spread imo. We can’t just do nothing while people who refuse to get vaccinated help generate new COVID mutations. We learned the hard way that weak measures were a mistake at the start, why do we have to double down on that now?
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United States44440 Posts
On August 28 2021 07:11 BlackJack wrote:
Whenever I read Mohdoo's posts I immediately remind myself that the Spanish Flu killed maybe 5%~ of the entire world's population and COVID-19 has killed far less than 0.1% of the world's population. I also remember that the large majority of people that die from COVID-19 are past the age of 65 which is longer than the life expectancy for 99.99%+ of the time our species has existed on this planet. Of all the problems humanity has ever faced this is the one that you think calls for totalitarianism and banishing your fellow man to the ocean for not falling in line? Mohdoo, do you think there is a chance that 50 years from now you will look back and be embarrassed for supporting these ideas?
The reason COVID has killed so little of the world population is totalitarianism in China. The low death rate of COVID globally is an argument for totalitarianism, not against. The death rate of COVID is considerably higher in the US.
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Why is this even here when you have a covid thread to talk about this? The last 2 pages hardly had anything to do with the political side of handling covid. Just wondering out loud.
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On August 28 2021 15:12 [GS]PLACiD wrote:
Why is this even here when you have a covid thread to talk about this? The last 2 pages hardly had anything to do with the political side of handling covid. Just wondering out loud.
Current topic is how the US ought to deal with antivaxers
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EPT
