Or are you just trolling out of boredom?
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, including this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
150 people arrested in London protest: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55116470
...including Jeremy Corbyn's brother, who was fined thousands of pounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52693383
People are being arrested just for filming empty hospitals: https://twitter.com/Jen70717630/status/1344332042188845056
Hundreds of people fined yesterday: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-hundreds-fined-over-new-...
This is clearly enough to create a chilling effect on socialisation.
They don’t understand that they have invited the fox into the henhouse. This model of crisis response is going to be broadly applied in other situations after Covid is over, and they’ve given the government all the ammunition they need to apply it and enforce it.
When the lockdown started, I moved out of London and back home into a relatively poor area. Most people were in favour of it then, but today I do not know a single pro-lockdown person here that isn't:
1) a student with guaranteed income from their loans
2) a white-collar worker, usually senior
3) is somebody who is retired or has a lot of money
I'm not somebody who advocates for breaking the lockdown, but I wish the people pushing for them need to realise there are real consequences beyond pure survival (like people being evicted or going hungry). Rishi Sunak seems to be the only person in government who seems to understand the economic devastation to follow and is openly worried about it.
Most of my personal circle though is small business owners, and starting with the laughable PPP mess and joke loan offerings, and just screwed up situation economically and shifted consumer habits, many are looking for the exits and running for the hills.
Only a couple in my group are doing really well in all of this, but they cater to the luxury end of the scale and the rich have gotten significantly richer in all of this. One of them does very high end custom pools and he is booked into 2022 with jobs because of all the California money flowing into Arizona.
My main concern is we have green lit tyranny to the governments around the world. For a virus that is arguably no worse than anything else we’ve experienced in the last 60-80 years we have flipped human rights and liberties on it’s head and completely perverted it. We are now in the process of normalizing this situation and behavior long term. The consequences of this are going to be felt for years after this, if not decades. We likely won’t even remember the virus in 5-7 years, but we’ll still be living under the system it ushered in.
> The consequences of this are going to be felt for years after this, if not decades. We likely won’t even remember the virus in 5-7 years, but we’ll still be living under the system it ushered in.
Economically, for sure. From a human rights perspective I can't see us continuing for much longer without large scale riots, like we saw earlier this year but directly focused on the lockdown.
One chilling effect from all this is when something worse than Covid inevitably comes about, reasonable countermeasures are going to be completely ignored.