Running about 6.7 million dead so far, so there's little tolerance for fantasists. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Obviously not good, but it's not apocalyptic either. (Not bad enough to justify writing off 'freedom' as an awful selfish far-right concept that should be purged from society entirely?)
That's the death count with the measures put in place. If C-19 hadn't been taken as seriously as it was then you might be adding a zero to that death count. Maybe two.
Maybe that was the event that completely broke everybody's sense of proportion. 100ml liquid bottle? Can't take it on a plane. Airborne pathogen? Sure, why not, bring it aboard.
I suspect the same is true of covid, but how do we break the cycle? Is it innate in politics?
Unless you mean obvious a-holes that back then refused to put on masks in shops and public transport and made it a political issue, which it was not, simply a security one.
It was wonderful to see all those slightly weird quiet types suddenly go full blown nuts and dive head first into various redneck conspiracy theories, if they weren't drowning in them before. Reasonable mankind lost those for good probably, but they were never truly part of it so at least now we see situation more clearly and can manage expectations more realistically.
Why the ridiculous straw man?
Specifically, it was very old and otherwise very sick people.
A large percentage of the deaths were simply pulled forward a couple years. Tragic and awful, yes. But worth 2 years of major disruptions to life and the huge lingering economic impacts?
At this point, I think most would say no. It was absolutely not worth it.
Up until COVID there was a pretty good social contract going on where we'd all promised never to do the things that the authorities then went and did. 7 million deaths doesn't justify that, WWII alone was 70-80 million people lost trying to promote the opposite of the COVID response. Liberty is important. And might turn out to be a better policy depending on how bad the shock of the COVID response turns out to be (see, for example, the article).
Of course, these interruption were tiny compared to those of life in England or France or other battlefields of the the war. There’s an entire genre of literature and film devoted to lives ripped apart by the interruption of World War II.
The lesson of WWII isn’t that we never need to impose individual sacrifice, but rather that the preservation of our liberty requires deep collective sacrifice on occasion, and to work to protect it not just for ourselves but for our friends who by virtue of luck are in a worse situation than we are.
But that wasn't the point I really wanted to make; what I'm trying to say is that we should be dealing with a substantially bigger emergency before the COVID response was justified. Seriously; how hard is it to just leave people alone to make their own decisions, and pass information to them to try and help them make the best decisions?
Obviously there is a limit - China has recently hit the end of political support for zero-covid restrictions, because they were extremely onerous even in an already totalitarian country.
And most measures and expert driven response were pretty ineffective anyway. People whip out the 6 million number as though it has any bearing on the number of people who might have died or been saved by different responses to COVID which is really pretty disingenuous and emotionally inflammatory. A lot of government particularly health policy involves tradeoffs with lives, you can't just try to put blame on people for deaths if you don't like their position and use that as an argument. Because some extremist can always come in on the other side of your position and make exactly the same argument against your position.
In other words, why would you be the arbiter of exactly what is reasonable and what is "extremely onerous" and when you can and can not allow people to make their own decisions? It's circular logic, you basically justify your position by asserting they are the right decisions.
Because....?
When it comes down to it, you're arguing for a type of society that prioritizes certain values, and those who disagree with those policies are arguing for a society that prioritizes different values. You are not automatically right or morally superior simply because you value safety more than freedom.
It astounds me that people look at the utterly bungled and hare brained government responses to covid (or 9/11 or Katrina or the war on drugs or Vietnam) and can turn around say, "See? We need to give these corrupt greedy nitwits even more power to control our lives."
You can’t speed 65mph through red lights, for instance. In public spaces, or with actions that can’t be contained, many of your choices have consequences for me, so I get to have a say.
The restrictions generally targeted private spaces. In Australia we even went as far as banning friends visiting each other at home.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. You earn that privilege by agreeing to follow certain rules.
Being able to walk in public spaces or associate with whom you wish in private spaces is a right, not a privilege. You don't need to earn your rights. Do you see the difference here?
Governments will overreach and violate civil liberties when the people don't resist (Snowden revelations, anybody?). That's the lesson.
But many other actions, from curfews, to govt planning of the economy, a draft, collective bomb shelters in London, etc, clearly did help preserve life and Liberty in the long term.
Sure, but it makes the point that just because people claim some measure is for the collective good, doesn't mean we should just take that at face value. Power is easily abused and we should be demanding more transparency and accountability from people who want to impose onerous top-down restrictions for speculative reasons. Instead, we get legions of people shouting down and vilifying those who are expecting more.
A literal interpretation of this (comprehensive) text yields a rather bold claim.
I'm sorry but this is ludicrous. WW2 wasn't fought for liberty or freedom - the big 3 Allies were an extremely oppressive dictatorship, a colonial empire and US (which interned it's Japanese citizens in concentration camps and still had bloody segregation as something normal, so while somewhat better than the other two, far from a bastion of liberty). Furthermore, they were only fighting as an alliance of convenience because the war came to them (Axis invading/declaring war), the only exception being the UK deciding to finally stick to it's promises, and not sign a peace treaty (and that was very much thanks to Churchill's perseverance, there were enough people who wanted peace at all costs).
The war was to stop and defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy. Liberty and freedom, or saving the Jews/Poles/Greeks/Czechos/Slovaks were never among the goals, or the war would have started much earlier and wouldn't have waited for Axis powers to declare it.
Also, the vast majority of the dead were on the Eastern Front, civilians and soldiers alike, and the people there were highly repressed before, during and after the war.
And in every participant in the war there was extreme censorship and liberty restrictions (like not being allowed to eat whatever one wants, and not being allowed to have lights on at night, curfews, etc.).