Post by hoyajinx on Sept 28, 2024 11:11:02 GMT -5
Honestly, I’m not even sure what you are saying anymore. I acknowledged the hypocrisy of it. But the hypocrisy doesn’t invalidate the underlying recommendations or ideas. If that’s what you got from the article or if that was what the author was trying to convey, that’s a really terrible argument and in no way a “valid point”. If I say that inciting political violence is wrong and then incite political violence, that doesn’t suddenly mean inciting political violence is right, it just makes me a hypocrite. If the discussion you intend is “were they hypocritical?”, I already agreed, so I’m not certain where the discussion goes from there.
But your broader point was that it’s really concerning when people treat public or elected officials as messianic, and I agree. That’s especially a problem we are seeing right now in the current election and is deeply concerning, but I have a sneaking suspicion you are more or less okay with it in this particular instance.
Is the point of your comment "but that hypocrisy pales in comparison to what we’ve been offered by politicians in the intervening 4 years." to say that the problem is much worse than what i posted because others are doing similar and arguably crazier and more hypocritical things? if so then we agree.
Maybe this is on me, but when i read BUT at the beginning there, it immediately sounds like a form of "what about-ism" where you minimize a legitimate problem with people whose actions you might not like in this instance but who are aligned with your favorite color and as a result, you assume you will usually agree with their ideas and actions in other situations. You then try to shift the conversation to discuss people whose ideas you don't tend to agree with instead. If you can't bare to hold the people who wear your favorite color accountable when they, to put it lightly, step way out of line (and you agreed that this is way out of line) then how are you any better than the people you disagree with?
I believe that it cant get much worse than locking people in their homes, forcing people to die alone without their loved ones, destroying businesses and robbing a generation of children of a big part of their youth while putting them - especially the poorest in our society - at a lasting disadvantage educationally, in exchange for benefits that the people making these decisions obviously did not even believe in.
My point in sharing this to the discussion is obviously to attempt to bring some sanity to those who read this thread, many of which were and appear to continue to be cheerleaders for those policies and would cheer for them again despite the benefits of hindsight.
While I can't imagine what would or has risen to that level of malfeasance, we can agree to disagree on whether or not other people have done worse in "the intervening 4 years."
I can not, however, see how anyone can say that so many things have happened that are so much worse (especially within the thread topic of Covid 19) than the horrific outcomes wrought by people like Varmas, Newsom and many, many others that it doesn't even merit attention because we are busy with much more important and troubling issues. Is that not the point you are making in dismissing my post?
But I didn’t dismiss your post. I acknowledged the hypocrisy of it. You, however, seem to be taking the general position that every decision made during the pandemic by these figures was wrong, and their private decisions prove it. That’s simply not a logical conclusion to draw, it’s just one that happens to fit the narrative you’ve posited for the past 4 years. I literally do not care about a single one of these people as public figures or politicians, so it’s not even about “my color vs. your color”. You have hitched your wagon to Prasad and seem to have put utter faith in him being a truth-teller who is on the up and up (despite many of the posts in this thread which should cast serious doubt on that conclusion), possibly because he aligns with your preferred opinions. You act as everything you have written in your post is settled fact, that none of the precautions taken were a benefit to society. I, and many others, simply don’t see it that way. Could things have been handled better? Sure. But I do believe that a lot of public health officials were doing the best they could with the information they had. You seem to think that public health officials and politicians simply wanted to subjugate the masses (but to what end, I have no idea). I think it’s deeply unfair to cast aspersions on all public health officials because a few high profile ones acted inappropriately.
In terms of my “sneaking suspicion”, you made a point to broaden this particular to a general statement, namely your concern in how willing people were to praise these people. My suspicion arises in that we have a candidate for president who is treated by his followers as literally chosen by God. At no point have you raised this concern is any other venue despite there being much more deeply held reverence for and widespread worship of him than any of these individuals. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that since you raise this concern in this forum and nowhere else that you don’t really have a problem with it. I certainly may be wrong, but it isn’t an unreasonable conclusion to draw.