Conservatism Conservatism is an aesthetic, cultural, social, and political philosophy, which seeks to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions.
Literally that; I place value in traditional social institutions.
Like my University, my local pub, the office, lecture halls, and yeah, the handshake. Freedom of travel. That stuff.
I think they're more important than coronavirus nonsense. A lot more. Certainly now, so now we have to fight to get them back to where they were. They're worth as much to me as one of my limbs would be, they're life itself.
If you don't enjoy the pub that's fine, different strokes for different folks. That's why we have freedom of association, I hang out with my people, you with yours, job done.
What I'm calling antisocial is bans, restrictions, shame, etc etc. The virus is out there and basically everyone is gonna get it, turning onto each other is hate for the sake of hate.
Dude I've been in enough public bathrooms to never want to touch some random stranger's hand. You know how many people I've seen go from the toilet straight out the door? TOO MANY. Too many people on the internet who were like "My hands are clean, my privates are clean, I never touched anything dirty!" or whatever. EUGH.
GROSS.
when i hang out with my friends many have a beer while me and some others don't and nobody is bothered by that. that's what makes us social. our drinking habits don't factor into it at all.
Personally speaking, I think this argument is extremely poor.
From a medical standpoint, basically anything that's not shutting yourself in, working out moderately and eating an exceedingly boring diet should be left in the past as well. Good food (Obesity epidemic), extreme sports, any profession with any notable level of risk (Advice from medical professionals is exceedingly slanted to the side of caution), any drink with an alcohol content above 0.
Acceptable levels of risk are part of everyday life, and we're certainly not going "there's a nonzero risk so I refuse to do it" every time you cross the road or leave the house, is there?
Sure but at the same time, I don't go "hey let's do some donuts in the middle of the freeway! There aren't that many cars around right now!" or go driving without my seatbelt on or whatever.
Edit: I also don't fly kites in thunder storms.
Moreover, this is a response to
>I don't mind shaking hands but, from a medical perspective it seems like a tradition that would best be left in the past.
I simply dislike the use of a "medical" justification here, as it feels more like an appeal to misleading statistics than anything else.
But, please consider that you're not doing any favors to your beloved institutions by being rude to your peers there as a result of your assumptions about what motivates them.
Here in the UK we're nearly there. Our government is considering removing all restrictions sometime in the next 2 months (it may end up being a bit more phased - lot's of people are in favour of continuing to mandate self-isolation when you actually currently have the virus). If you want that where you live then consider advocating for vaccination uptake, because that's what's allowing us to make these changes here without triggering a public health crisis.
1% risk of death. Wait, now sub 0.1%, thx vaccine. Meanwhile schools are still in dystopia mode, Universities are nothing like they were when I went, almost every job in my field is gone, shitloads of businesses have permaclosed, etc.
We can't even reverse it now, loads of it is baked in. Remove all legal restrictions and half of the people are still wearing face masks and avoiding socialising 'cus Covid'.
March-May 2020 kind of sort of made sense (I still think we could have just asked people rather than using legal force but whatever). Beyond that, sunk cost after sunk cost and just an increasingly bizarre game of one-upmanship "look, I can make my life worse than yours!".
_This_ is radicalization - believing an ever deepening web of bollocks and as a result drastically changing one's way of interacting with the world. They don't even remember how they used to live and why.
I stand by my statement - it is conservative to accept a slightly increased risk in order to maintain our traditions. It is radical to flip the world on a dime. (The UK Conservative Party is emphatically not conservative by any reasonable definition).