If the vaccines were sterilizing, mandates would still be unconscionable

Clown World Today 🤡🌎 @cwt_news

🤡🌎 “nobody said the vaccine prevents infection and transmission!”

Their authoritarian lockdowns, shutdowns, masks and vaccines mandates didn’t work. …and this video above nicely shows how their vaccines didn’t live up to expectations.

But so what if they had?! And, what if all their interventions somehow had worked, and had minimal side effects? What then? Do we just bring ‘em on?

No.

But if you rest your case on the fact that their ingenious ideas didn’t work, they’ll be back in a jiffy with lockdowns-shutdowns-masks-vax-mandates-2.0, and these ones totally work and we have the science to show it!!

That’s one of the reasons I have tried to focus mainly on the ethical side of these authoritarian breaches (as well as the psycho-societal, mass delusion, side of it).

This isn’t about the best way to be a utilitarian. Never was.

For folks on Twitter’s Team Rationality early on, you may remember @AlistairHaimes, someone seemingly grasping that the world had slid sideways. But, some months in it was clear he was just a utilitarian with a line a bit different than that of Team Panic. In his own personal jiffy he flipped, and suddenly in late 2020 all the interventions he had criticized were entirely reasonable and necessary. It was clear to me that the casedemic, which was in full earnest by Fall of 2020, had scared the bajeezus out of him. He panicked, and any attachment he had to civil liberties fell by the way side.

This isn’t about whether lockdowns or masks or vaccines work. Getting into the weeds with them about whether they work can easily be mistaken as agreeing that the interventions would be justified if they did work.

And, furthermore, as you may have noticed, you can’t even break through to them that they don’t work. So, it’s pointless anyhow.

Of course, I’m as guilty as the rest of us on getting pulled into these debates, especially on Twitter, such as this one (among thousands).

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

Lockdowns were NOT common sense measures. They were hysterical reactions out of fear. Here are 15 of just some of the reasons why it was not common sense. (I’m not including all the reasons we have NOW to see they were a bad idea.)

I suspect making these arguments is one important part of fighting this, at least in winning over those on the fence and in giving confidence to those on Team Rationality. …and in winning in the courts.

But it shouldn’t be the focus. (Which is why my Moment video series entirely avoids getting into these weeds.)

The focus on resistance to Covid authoritarianism needs to be grounded in ethics, and on the lesser and greater crimes against humanity that have been committed worldwide.