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262k dead, +2313 yesterday. If this were actually a price being paid for "freedom" in some real sense, like people taking risks and dying to establish a new space settlement across the galaxy, it would at least feel meaningful. This just feels like callous mutual abandonment.
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The thing is, there is a good-faith use of the freedom vs. nanny-state narrative that is being deployed that does not actually apply here. "Freedom" is just code for "fuck you, I got mine."
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Like there are real problems about say using Taiwan as a comparator. It's a nice little island democracy and I like people from there. But there is a genuine cost to being Taiwan that the US is not willing to pay for good reason. But that's not the actual relevant cost here 🤬
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ie, doing the things Taiwan did/is doing won't actually make you Taiwan (or Singapore or New Zealand or whatever) and ruin the ability to build innovative companies like Google or NASA missions.
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And it's not like the US has a problem with ostensibly pro-social confinement/freedom restriction on flimsy pretexts. Highest incarceration rates with rampant covid outbreaks in prisons. It's just reserved for offenses like having a bit of marijuana on you.
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If you were exposed and don't attempt to self-isolate, it's a kind of terrorism by apathy in service of a hedonistic-freedom ideology.
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Regular terrorism: telling a young recruit to your ideology to plant a bomb Stochastic terrorism: giving an inflammatory speech that inspires some moron to plant a bomb Apathetic terrorism: refusing to know things that might cast your negligent homicides as first-degree murders
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You are confusing the arrow of causality. It’s not that doing the things they did would turn us into them it’s that you have to be like them to be OK with doing the things they did. Any system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets.