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you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a

you're probably right that the country would collapse. people could hardly handle masking in public for a year, it's hard to believe they could last more than a couple months with world war two rations. we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.

crossroadsguy 2y ago
> we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good. Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good. Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there. On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”. Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else. I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
lupusreal 2y ago
The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers. A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
- chasd00 2y ago
  > If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe. From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Old people weren’t the ones asking for more pandemic restrictions. They were most strongly supported by politically progressive city-dwelling Millennials.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Oh yes they were. "You're killing grandma!" was the battle cry of the isolationists.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      The lockdowns were justified in the name of old people, yes. That doesn't mean old people were the ones calling for them.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        Appeals to grandma weren't targetted at baby boomers; their grandmas are long dead already. The baby boomers are the grandmas the rhetoric referenced.
        School-Cotton 2y ago
        I understand that. Regardless of who the rhetoric referenced, it was not propagated primarily by old people. Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.
- Damogran6 2y ago
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I'm no sociologist but WW2 was different in that they had one (or more) common enemies, same with post-9/11; if Americans have a common enemy, they can tolerate a lot of shit. But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  > there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
  - xattt 2y ago
    It wouldn’t have been framed as liberty-quashing if it wasn’t for said propaganda circles. Most people can’t form an opinion better than a stool without simple “[VERB] the [NOUN]” talking points, and these were readily available in low-quality yellow-on-black text JPEGs. Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      > Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. > What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months? Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example? --- EDIT to explain further: Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options: OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83. OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82. In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B. Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time. If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).
veunes 2y ago
The way people reacted to even small-scale inconveniences in recent years highlights just how much has shifted since the 1940s

crossroadsguy 2y ago

> we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good. Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good. Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there. On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”. Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else. I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!

lupusreal 2y ago

The whole American economy is already rigged to let baby boomers cash out at the end of their lives so they can travel Europe while younger generations struggle to make rent. Then I'm supposed to mask up and stay inside for an indefinite period of time ("two weeks to flatten the curve" becomes two months, then starts to look like it will be two years...), for what? To protect myself from an illness which nearly everybody my age shrugs off effortlessly? No, to protect the baby boomers so that they might live even longer. American society revolves around baby boomers. A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.

chasd00 2y ago
> If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe. From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
School-Cotton 2y ago
Old people weren’t the ones asking for more pandemic restrictions. They were most strongly supported by politically progressive city-dwelling Millennials.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Oh yes they were. "You're killing grandma!" was the battle cry of the isolationists.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    The lockdowns were justified in the name of old people, yes. That doesn't mean old people were the ones calling for them.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Appeals to grandma weren't targetted at baby boomers; their grandmas are long dead already. The baby boomers are the grandmas the rhetoric referenced.
      - School-Cotton 2y ago
        I understand that. Regardless of who the rhetoric referenced, it was not propagated primarily by old people. Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.
Damogran6 2y ago

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

I'm no sociologist but WW2 was different in that they had one (or more) common enemies, same with post-9/11; if Americans have a common enemy, they can tolerate a lot of shit. But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.

School-Cotton 2y ago
> there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
- xattt 2y ago
  It wouldn’t have been framed as liberty-quashing if it wasn’t for said propaganda circles. Most people can’t form an opinion better than a stool without simple “[VERB] the [NOUN]” talking points, and these were readily available in low-quality yellow-on-black text JPEGs. Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    > Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. > What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months? Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example? --- EDIT to explain further: Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options: OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83. OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82. In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B. Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time. If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).

veunes 2y ago

The way people reacted to even small-scale inconveniences in recent years highlights just how much has shifted since the 1940s