None taken, or at least, taken with a smile. That adjective could go a bunch of ways, but it brought up that phrase ‘brazen hussy’. It was an attempt at a rhetoric trick on my part. If ‘brazen’ was meant as critique of me, well, I brought up a common phrase it was used in, where someone was considered shameless for being sexual, basically, a position on that person that would now be considered sexist in many circles. So, it was a sneaky jest on my part, mostly funny to myself, I am sure. But speaking of categories, like ‘brazen’ and ‘hussy’…
With categories, we have to be careful with them once we are going to use force (re, the op). Without that force in the picture, it’s a different ballgame.
Radical shifts in government power coupled with categorizing people, reduction of privacy, increase in law enforcement roles, reduction of freedom, all at the same time
is something to be very cautious about.
Think about other moments in history when those kinds of changes happened all at once. I am not sure I can think of a postive example, and the negative examples are amongst the worst: the rise of fascism pre-ww2 included just such a constellation of changes, for example, with dire consequences. Of course, this could be the exception. That’s where caution and discussion comes in. For example, I see no public debate about how the governments will give back their newly acquired powers, what political (representational?) body will determine the process, timing, necessity. No wider public debate by the mainstream liberals and conservatives about how much those who stand to benefit are influencing the information we are receiving that informs what measures are taken.
Skepticism, caution, exploratory investigations. There has been a systematic overlabeling of deaths as Covid - when I say systematic, I mean that in many nations generalized policies labeled deaths Corona, when we don’t know if it was Corona. But how much, we don’t know yet. It might not be significant. Perhaps only a small % were, in the end, false conclusions. But since the effects are enormous, this needs to be looked at. There are reasonable questions about the until recently official version of the disease. Vaccine criticism is actively marginalized by a very concentrated media and there is vast sums of money to be earned there. Why is an amateur in public health like Bill Gates so closely intertwined with policy? Why is it ok for someone who stands to gain financially from public health policies allowed to have so much influence over WHO which guides countries’ policies? There are anomolies in past responses to potential pandemics and also in vaccine production. The person who is representing the pessimistic end of speculations on the disease (how long lockdowns will be in place, how much society must forever remain changed…and more) is the highest official advisor to the president and the country, is also the person who deliberately funded research into then illegal gain of effect research, by shifting it to China since it was illegal in the states, on corona viruses in the specific species of bat that became the source of the disease in the city with the lab he funded.
As society potentially permanently changes its rules on surveillance, law enforcement powers, and government powers, we should go through extremely careful analysis of what is happening, who it benefits, how much influence they have on the changes, how much control of the media they have. Trusting Snopes is not enough. I see Snopes, a private organization, suddenly being taken as the authority, and Google channels people towards Snopes. Why does it get so much power and focus?
There’s a lot more.