of course it doesn't. i already noticed that you're incapable of rational and critical thinking, so that's not a surprise.



that's pretty rich coming from someone who characterises the support for social distancing measures as blind obedience to authority.

if you actually cared about the truth and nuance of the situation, you'd be aware that i oppose allowing the government access to private phone data to track movement of infected people for example. acknowledging basic scientific facts, however, and therefore recognising that social distancing makes a lot of sense (and realistically can only be upheld if those rules apply to everyone, and not just those that don't think they are above their fellow citizens), is clearly something very different in nature - and impossible to enforce indefinitely.

This post was edited by fender on Apr 4 2020 11:16am

it's really funny how 'principled libertarianism' just constantly and violently clashes with the realities of any civilised society, painfully exposing it as the pubescent and anti-social political philosophy that it really is. it's really embarrassing how many people never grow out of that rebellious edgy phase to be honest...

Watching the people within the country, and the leadership manage the crisis.. We literally look like the village idiot(s)
embarassing

The STASI in socialist (former) East Germany already succeeded in turning a critical mass of the people into voluntary snitches and enforcers of their rule. Finding collaborators for oppressive authoritarian rule is not exactly difficult.

Also note that Western governments (correctly!!!) concluded that a massive shutdown of public life would only be accepted by their respective people after pictures, reports and videos of the apocalyptic situation in Northern Italy provided undeniable proof for the severity and urgency of these measures. Had a Western government tried to enact such a shutdown in, say, mid-February, there'd have been revolts.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 4 2020 11:37am

There were conspiracy theories being floated around, which if we critically examine are kind of nonsensical but China could develop some really good takeaways from this, not only how their people responded but how their adversaries people have.

It's plausible that some sort of secret contingency plans could be put into vaults, where in case some authoritarian leadership starts to lose their grasp on power they can manufacture a crisis. By doing so you could crack down on dissidents and have some sort of reason to fall back on to justify it which a fair portion of the populace would buy.

Similarly you could study a country like the US or another key adversary of theirs. It's a scary thought but in the future some hostile nation can use biological warfare to completely destroy an adversary from within. It's a way more effective tactic of warfare to release a disease which eats away at the countries economy and creates wholesale social unrest than to build carriers and have hundreds of thousands of soldiers invade when the host population would clearly see the foreign adversary and rally against it. I hope this remains sci-fi but any shrewd military organization should be taking this threat very seriously. I think the pentagon will get a nice biological defense research bump after all of this.

the link and quote below was before DeSantis issued the "safer-at-home order", which just further closed public spaces and issued guidelines for being in public. no 10-person gathering, etc. etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/04/01/coronavirus-florida-desantis/


really i don't see the issue if he was trespassing on closed government property. (i'd imagine that includes some water space, but not positive about any changes with that)
if the beach wasn't closed, then i'd have an issue with him being arrested. i'd suggest he get an attorney at that point i guess.

edit: also in that link it shows DeSantis left decisions of public closing to local government initially. which is what i meant by "further" closing public spaces.

This post was edited by tagged4nothing on Apr 4 2020 12:17pm

There's a difference between each of us reasoning our way to different conclusions and being irrational. The only thing that's not a surprise is your inability to discern a distinction.



@ bold: I'm not the one here who stated he understood the authorities' reaction was ridiculous and then proceeded to defend the actions all the same.

I didn't broach the topic of phone tracking. I also didn't say that social distancing is a bad idea, or anything akin to saying it's a bad idea. I said, for all intents and purposes, that since there was no harm, there's no foul. Victimless crime and all that.

The part with the biological warfare is really interesting, and worrisome. One big problem I see with it, however, is controlling the spread. For a virus or other form of biological WMD to have an impact on the enemy nation, it would have to be highly contagious - which raises the question of how to prevent it from eventually spreading in your own country. Sure, they could already have a treatment or vaccine in place, but if they miraculously have a cure in hand while the disease ravages the rest of the world, they would give away their ownership of the virus, and by that point, the rest of the world would probably band together and gangbang them.

If they could come up with a biological WMD against which their own people are naturally immune, that would be really scary. Say a virus that only affects caucasians or africans, but not east asians.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 4 2020 12:42pm

you might want to read that part again, because you're once again just blatantly misrepresenting my position there. what i said is that it LOOKS (not IS!) ridiculous, IF you don't give it a second thought (a condition met multiple times just in this thread).

i proceeded to explained how in order to really rationalise his behaviour, however, you'd have to make some pretty anti-social and selfish assumptions, since you're relying on everyone else to adhere to different, stricter standards than yourself - otherwise the beach wouldn't be empty.