Is the Physics of Time Changing?

Don't get me wrong here, I am a very (sometimes overly) empathic person, I am the guy people run to for advice when they want to know how to talk to other people, because I can put myself into other people's shoes.

But that doesn't necessarily mean I like what I see when I put myself into thoes shoes. So if my post sounds unempathic, it does so because it is the pure distilled cycism of someone who really has it up to here with a certain unempathic, egomanic type of person — call it a enritled, vocal, screaming minority if you will.

I understand how horrible the whole thing felt to them. To a certain degree I even subscribe to Schopenhauer's notion of: "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants", so I am not even sure they can be blamed that they felt that way.

But because I understand a feeling doesn't mean I have to approve with the actions and words they derived from those feelings. That doesn't mean that in my view we gave those people way to much area on the stage of the pandemic as opposed to all the pressing social issues that actually emerged.

I think it's so strange how political masks and vaccines became. I'm not sure many people remember, but there was a brief period (February or March 2020?) where wearing masks was frowned on in the Bay Area — if I recall correctly, I think it was initially widely claimed that masks were not helpful against Covid and that a run on masks would take away supply from medical workers who use them as part of their daily work. I already had a box of N99 masks that I bought for the wildfires, so I wore one out anyway and got dirty looks. A short while later, everyone in the Bay Area was wearing them, and I no longer got those looks. But then I moved to the southeast and got dirty looks again for wearing a mask, because the politics of that region were different.

A few thoughts in response to that:

1. This is not the assessment of my friend at all. His kindergarden, btw. remained open during the whole pandemic and the parents that made him question his life choices were the once who sent their kids despite clear symptoms. So the children that have been deprived of socialization we are talking about here, are the ones who were ill. Something that happened to literally every generation there ever was.

2. In that moment the risks that were weighed against each other weren't just about the kids. Kids were one of the biggest contributers to the reproductive factor of the virus. So the choice was between moderating that R-factor so it is smaller than 1.0 and have the infection numbers go down or having it above 1.0 and risk saturating the health system (which can only handle so many infected people at once), which would also risk the lives of totally unrelated people who never got infected with Covid at all, but had chronic illnesses or accidents.

So on a level of "humanity VS virus" it was pretty clear that A) reducing the R rate till effective vaccines got distributed is a good strategy and that B) we had to ensure a good balance with the side effects of said reduction measures. At least where I live children have been the hottest discussed topic and every measure that affected them was very carefully (some would even say: too carefully) chosen.

Now we could do the math and calculate how many human lives that would translate too and then pose the question whether the "business as usual for kids" is truly the ethical right choice, given it clearly pumped up up the R factor and all that. On the one track you potentially have kids with psychological problems (back then this was just a guess) and on the other side with near mathematical certainty a pile of corpses, which are all older.

Now this is a hard ethical question and all depends on just how badly you predict those kids are affected, and how high that pile of corpses is going to be — but let's not forget there is always the benefit of hindsight.

Back then it was quite clear what had to be done to beat that virus. The matter of discussion was just whether individuals and organisations were willing and able to do it. Many were able, but not willing.

E.g. i'm pretty sure every traditional rule system recognizes "inter arma enim silent leges" to some extent or another. I suspect those who claim they don't at all aren't really following a rule system so much as making things up as they go and doing whatever is convinent.

You can read my post as a complaint about precisely that lack of utilitarian spirit and if you were to have a longer discussion with me I am convinced that you would see that I have rational reasons for why I think we all would fare better if didn't act under the illusion that we're all independent islands that have no overlap with others and our environment.

Now you can also overshoot into the other direction and submit everything to the whole, which can produce great horrors, but so do moste mental frameworks if they are deiven to the extreme (e.g. like individualism in the US).

That is to say: it would be different if someone said "I think it's wrong for the government to force people to quarantine; however, I'm going to quarantine anyways because it is the right thing to do."

I don't think this type of fear has anything to do with media fearmongering. People just hate being left alone with their thoughts.

Then in terms of entities not moving with respect to each other - isn't that only valid for dimensions we can observe? What if perceiving time at different pace means we are moving in a different dimension differently?