What is going on with Australia? Are they just generally giving up on liberal democracy and the idea of individual rights?
But it's for our own health. For the public welfare.
In this time of pandemic crisis strong measures are called for.
/S
Perhaps people are seeing that, on the one hand, large-scale problems (global warming, global pandemics, global economic boom-and-bust cycles, etc.) are having real consequences for individuals, and on the other hand, they cannot be resolved by simple independent action (because if they could, we'd be seeing trends of improvement, not worsening).
There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. People have traditionally turned to institutional power when individuals seem less trustworthy.
I don’t think that crisis of faith is unwarranted, given the reaction large swathes of people have had to public health measures like vaccination, plus political misinformation and straight out bullshit like Q. The average everyday man is a moron.
An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Yet still totally wrong and utterly fucked.
It's happened before and it'll happen again.
Best to leave us our right to choose.
No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.
In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources.
In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).
This certainly says something about the popular epistemology.
There are less than twenty people who have ever seen the surface of the moon. We believe their testimony on the topic.
So lets welcome the past with all its atrocities but this time for the "correct" reasons. Just like all the previous geniuses did. Who knows may be this time the F&C might win and rewrite history.
There are probably things we can do as a society (improve education being one) that might help.
But no, any observation that large groups people are unable to parse the modern world and come to reasonable conclusions simply must be because that person wants to implement newspeak and purge any that disagree.
Helpful.
Yet these “global issues” are getting worse.
To me it doesn’t seem obvious larger government is the solution. Of course that’s what most governments and media close to governments want you to believe.
See the other comment in this thread that free speech has been “weaponized” and therefor presumably must be curtailed “for our own good.”
It’s like even pointing out the problem makes you a heretic to the free speech absolutist creed.
Because if the government is wrong, and "science" literally caused the problem by playing with "gain of function" research, then they have nothing left to believe in their lives.
Incongruous.
China was performing the research, not the US. Which was precisely the problem. China's lab incompetence (which was documented prior to the pandemic) may have released the virus. The US apparently provided a very modest amount of funding to the lab in Wuhan toward gain of function research.
lol, you need to lean about the history of minorities in Australia starting with the indigenous people and how they were treated.
Same thing with their relations with all their small neighbors and with "undesirable" immigrants.
This is a great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia
There is nothing new to this in Australia's culture, is was just aimed at the weak and vulnerable, but as the famous quote by Tucidides goes: "The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself."