Ultimatums are bad faith and basically anti-liberal so I don't care for that sort of rhetoric, and I think more people should try that as a baseline.
When the ultimatums themselves do not account for the well-being of the elderly and vulnerable, we should not be giving that rhetoric credit. There's an ideological and intellectual distinction to be made between people's behaviors; those who want to discuss the "COVID tradeoff problem", and those who simplistically repeat talking points "but the economy will cause deaths too" (in reactance to the other narrative, the prediction of collapse of healthcare systems).
Re:State projections for Covid-19
by SpicyLemonZest on Sunday March 22, 2020 @07:44AM
(#22654274)
Sure, I’m happy to discuss taboo tradeoffs with people who are willing. Even a 3 month lockdown is clearly not worth the lives it would save. If you could rescue some Kansas man you don’t know from cancer, by cutting off friends and family and career for 3 months, you wouldn’t do it. And there’s orders of magnitude less than 1 life per person at stake here.
Most people aren’t willing to explicitly discuss how many lives it’s worth to be allowed to hug your mother, so for general consumption it must be framed in absolutes. There’s a number of weeks past which the cost is unacceptable and I’m joining the mob at City Hall, and that number is not in the double digits.
What's concerning about the current messaging is that it's not clear whether it's incorporated the underlying limits to how long people will tolerate a lockdown. An ultimatum is the right framing; decisionmakers need to know, and we need to know they know, that "then we'll lock down for 6 months" is not part of the solution space.