Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jan 18 2022 03:55am)
So now politicians around the world are stuck between a rock and a hard place: the promise that there would be no vaccine mandates, no new restrictions for the vaccinated and so on and on have already been broken, whatever trust there still was has been lost, probably irrevocably. They've already turned all anti-vaccine folks into their eternal enemies, lost any respect of the vaccine-sceptics and pissed off the anti-lockdown crowd and the normies. If they now actually listened to the science and went back on their embrace of mandates and coercion, say by acknowledging that mandates are stupid for a variant where they don't stop transmission and cases are mild anyway, they would also lose the support of the covid hardliners and karens.
By losing their nerves during Delta, politicians have tied themselves to a policy which is destined to become more and more unpopular as time goes on. "They dun' fucked up."
That's the part where the narrative goes off the rails though. Its like you say, there was a promise of return to normalcy, a reluctance to embrace the authoritarian measures during election season. But when the virus turned out to be a wet fart, it set the stage for them to put more slack in the leash and dial back the increasingly unpopular restrictions and sort out their supply chain crisis and return to normalcy like promised. But they didn't. That's the part where we plunged headlong into the draconian stage of authoritarianism and democrats started embracing the policies of the CCP at its worst. I don't see why losing their nerves on delta locked democrats into this death spiral, they could have reacted to the good news about Omicron ending in SA with almost zero deaths and spreading like mad in NYC with no death uptick and said oh, its time to capture the messaging and take a victory lap and reclaim the popular grounds we campaigned on.
I can't even see this as the self-interested actions of rational actors. This isn't good politics. Biden and the democrats are crashing and burning
hard. A radical fringe of the country might embrace this message, but look at the big picture of those poll results- its scary how many fringe democrats support authoritarianism, but the vast majority of Americans don't, and the more radical it becomes, the more alienating it becomes. Once it starts becoming rhetoric of taking away your children and putting you into concentration camps, even the radical democrats start getting cold feet and questioning their fanaticism. There's no self-serving interest in pursuing this lunacy.
Quote (RedFromWinter @ Jan 18 2022 05:03am)
From my perspective living in good old rural MN, the FED and State mandates were comical. The 'golden hammer' approach. If the goal was to reduce spread, have people mask, and equip hospitals, none of that happened. We had increased tourism on the North Shore as people wanted to 'get away' from the lockdowns from denser cities. Many of these people would be combative against sensible COVID measures requested in our small towns/bars. Imagine a badass biker gang acting like Karen's in a bar when the Sherriff has to tell them our town hospital has no beds for locals. Point is, the blanket golden hammer mandates were not great for a lot of jurisdictions and the political nature behind them was treasonous to the American people. Both Reds and Blues could have synchronized on COVID response rhetoric without the need for litigation or broad executive actions, instead we are down a path of lower trust society.
More specifically to MN, and why we had those billboards with Walz literally sticking his head up his own ass along the freeways, is that there was a glaring metropolitan bias in the measures adopted by the governor. The first year of the pandemic was a bunch of lockdown measures without any concern for localization or different degrees of application to urban vs rural, yet crafted to exempt stuff favorable to the cities. He shut down bars and restaurants state-wide except for take-out orders, even when rural minnesota had basically zero cases of covid and it was almost entirely geographically clustered in the cities. But rural restaurants can't survive on take-out like the cities can. I remember I got Pho from Quang on Nicollet on Christmas last year and there was a line of people wrapped around inside the building, spreading their germs in close contact. Totally fine to be standing clustered together indoors under Walz's order. But Keith Ellison sued to shut down Shady's Restaurants in the northland when nobody was at risk of catching Covid there. People in the cities were already congregating as large crowds with covid spreading like wildfire
before they mobbed up and burned the cities down, and at that point it was obvious nobody was ever going to enforce the mandates in downtown, only weaponized against republican districts.