Simple but reasonable.
I would want to tease a little more out here - why is it constructed, who constructed it, and does morality in general have merits? (If so, what would you say those are?)
I half understand how you feel but with how a lot of people are with anything even remotely controversial the downvote button really has become "This is an opinion I don't like intuitively."
Ex: On that other platform I can say something perfectly reasonable one place, get a ton of upvotes, in another, a ton of downvotes, and that can make for really samethink "only say safe things," kinds of communities which frankly is extremely boring. I can get why it's a thing.
Maybe the wording could be tweaked a little if it's coming off as talking down to...but there are a lot people who could at least use a reminder to think about things a little more charitably even when they disagree with them.
Interesting if you look at the beginning of the pandemic the Democrats and Republican positions were reversed, (ex: on masks) but COVID hit democratic states hardest first (being by the ocean) and that changed pretty quickly.
Had Trump still been president when the vaccine rolled out (he was highly in favour of a "light speed" recovery) I highly suspect that we would have seen a lot of left-wing people suddenly being far more skeptical (if not conspiratorial) - not because of anything to do with the science, but because of the person telling them to get vaccinated.
And because Americans just like to be partisan and contrary (I apologize to reasonable Americans in the audience).
I would actually say I've seen this go both ways too - I was in Japan in 2020 and there were very much in denial about COVID likely in part because it happened just before the Olympics were supposed to (economically disastrous for a country already struggling).
Conversely, once they started to actually have public policy on it, their restrictions were significantly more moderate than in most places in Canada - in my prefecture aside from an initial month of lockdown I never stopped working, as a teacher, in-person, teaching hundreds of students a week. I could still go eat food with colleagues most times, and our infection numbers rarely exceeded double digits in the whole prefecture. How did we do it?
Our prefecture took more of a laser-focused approach to things - when infections started upticking they would make rules like "no eating at restaurants open after 8pm" and had 5 levels of very oddly specific rules about things you could and couldn't do in public. They often targeted shutting remotely resembling nightlife first because a lot of infections would come from anything that looked like that. Looking at some places in Canada which were being far more draconian (and doing worse) from a public policy end it felt that the Japanese "Don't ask for more than people can do," was more successful. (Of course this was less the case for places like Osaka, Tokyo, etc but even they were on the whole less strict than, say BC).
Would a more Japanese approach have worked in Canada? Hard to say, but I think there is a case to be made that some restrictions were asking for more than a lot of people were willing to give. Essentially, knowing people and good public policy isn't necessary the same as understanding science, because you have to consider what people are willing to comply with, and what is asking too much, whether certain things will backfire, what downsides there are to policy, etc. and it's reasonable for us as citizens to have objections (one way or the other) - I would even go so far as to say that's part of our civic duty.
I'll keep it simple and say that I'm in general a fair bit more skeptical about authority, politicians and overreach (particularly during emergency situations) than you are. I don't think the conclusions that authorities/media come to about science or how they choose to portray it should be accepted without question, nor should those who didn't be silenced (and this was the case even among some professionals). They have self-interests which don't necessarily at all times align with the public good.
I think people are right to have felt that some things were off, even if they were wrong to wholesale believe some particularly questionable explanations. I believe the average person has reasonably good intuitions but often gets the details wrong when the underlying factors that need to be understood are more complex and that's where they end up making themselves look foolish.
Sorry I had to. 😂
- and even what remains of the CBC is like that meme with the guy peaking at the other person's paper. Just a lot of copy-pasting the American narrative, which is often little less than a panicked frenzy insisting that the end of the world is nigh, make sure to vote for to prevent it. Sadly even Canadians who I would expect to know better lap it up.
I will share my skepticism about that goal as this is also something I heard last time they won and here we are with a Biden administration. Where I can agree is that American democracy has as a whole gone downhill, even just in terms of the quality of candidates they're offering. (Did anyone think any of Trump, Hillary or Biden were particularly appealing compared to even relatively recent alternatives?)
The way I'd put this in technical terms is "What percentage of your disposable income is going towards helping others?" $50 for someone making minimum wage is probably more than $1 million coming from a billionaire.
Any party that doesn't attract the "You agree with me or you're my enemy," types would get my attention. I think a party that focuses more on smart policy that's good for the people at large as opposed to empty ideology and vote posturing over contentious issues would attract me. We need people to run the country, not win some kind of high school popularity contest.
I wouldn't quite go that far, but I would focus more of my efforts where more results are to be had. There are still some genuinely open-minded/genuinely confused adults out there, so you can't give up on them entirely and you should still make some efforts, but a lot of what people spend a lot of time doing is basically throwing grass in the wind.