[ExI] UN worried about police brutality against protestors

[John Klos]

> Really? Did you think it over before committing this to the keyboard?

Yes, I did.

> Let me upack the logic here for you. Let's assume that a population of 
> well-informed individuals who are at risk of a deadly infection if they 
> leave their homes but are safe if they stay in...

This isn't the case at all. We have well meaning people who care about 
themselves, their families and people around them. They are conscientious 
and careful, they wear masks, and they've gotten vaccinated. This is a 
majority of people.

Then we have people who are in excellent health and/or think that the 
effects of Covid are exaggerated, and therefore don't care much about 
whether they get Covid, but who aren't selfish and care enough about 
others to vaccinate, wear masks and otherwise participate in trying to 
avoid spreading Covid.

Then you have people who want to force their beliefs on others. It's not 
enough for them to passively participate, or to avoid public places. They 
don't care about possibly affecting others.

Trying to say that the last group is equal to the first two and are 
equally "making the decision for themselves" is... Well, it's ridiculous. 
You're really, really stretching here, so much so that I find it difficult 
to know whether to take you seriously.

You're essentially saying that engaging in risky public behavior that can 
hurt others is fine, because others have made the decision to participate 
in being public. So, by extension, you're saying that if 5% of the 
population wants to do something to scare the other 95% in to staying in 
their houses, they should be allowed, because, again, we're all making our 
own decisions about whether to participate in anything public. You're also 
suggesting that the concept of "public good" has little or no weight nor 
value.

If this is how you feel, then we fundamentally disagree, and we can simply 
agree to disagree.

But I know for a fact that you would be screaming bloody murder if the 
roles were reversed.

Imagine this: what if I had an aerosol form of a Covid vaccine and walked 
around in public spraying it everywhere? And what if my attitude was that 
if you don't want to be vaccinated, then simply don't go out in public. 
Would you meekly stay home and accept that we're both making decisions for 
ourselves? No, of course you wouldn't. But I seriously doubt you could 
acknowledge this.


I brought up pollution not as an analogy but as an example of how 
self-righteousness and selfishness are similar between polluters and 
anti-vaccine people: they both require the idea that the individual's 
desires outweigh any possible impact to others.

But if you want to make an analogy of it, I'd suggest that it's similar to 
people who drive while on the phone not caring about their potential 
impact on others. Again, there's no equivalence between those who don't 
want to be told to not be on their phones and everyone else. We'd accuse 
people who insist they should be allowed to drive while using their phones 
of a "tremendous amount of selfishness and a criminal lack of self 
reflection", but obviously not all drivers :)

And I haven't the slightest clue about what you're talking about in your 
non-sequitur about "lazy, witless moralizing" that has somehow led to 
"turmoil that cost tens of trillions of dollars and millions of lives".

I wish there were more substance in what you're writing, because I REALLY 
want to understand why people anti-vaccine and anti-mask people don't 
really care about others. Outrage about masks, negative test results, or 
vaccination requirements is somehow equivalent and just as bad as, in your 
collective minds, possibly harming or killing people. If someone killed 
someone you love via Covid, would you really be OK with the idea that it 
could've been avoided, but avoiding is too onerous? Would you even answer 
that question honestly?

John