Over the last few years, I’ve felt as though I’ve been living in a feverish dream all the time. Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve. And this is yet another example.

Five years ago, the masses told the authoritarians that they could have as much power as they wanted. The authoritarians loved it and now know the uprising against their excesses will never happen. This is just the beginning.

So lockdowns are still happening? If not why?

It's six years later, and what happened during a public health emergency is still the most significant impingement upon personal liberty occupying your headspace? If you earnestly care about liberty, get off your simulated hobby horse and come back to reality. It's exactly this kind of disconnected nonsense that has encouraged the authoritarians to run wild.

Is he wrong though? Lots of bad precedents were set during that emergency, the consequences of which were still living with.

The Overton window moved in a deeply authoritarian direction during that time period. Politicians across the spectrum have internalized that move and are restricting freedom in far more overt ways than were possible prior to that emergency.

If you want to prevent future abuses, understanding how and why past abuses happened seems quite reasonable. I don’t find such an idea nonsense or disconnected from reality at all.

I don't see "lots of bad precedents", so please elaborate on what you mean.

What I saw were a bunch of temporary measures directly supporting public health, in line with past precedents from prior generations, that were eventually ended - which is a lot better than we can say for any teeth in the ratchet of techno-authoritarianism that has been slowly advancing over the past several decades!

The main thing I saw, and it was more of a demonstration rather than a precedent, was how readily people are led to political rallying cries that go against their own stated values, common sense, and the realities of a situation. How quick people are to tear down our institutions given the right leader that plays to their immediate feelings.

To me, that is the authoritarianism we can draw a direct line from to what we are facing today - basically the continued escalation of giant douche vs turd sandwich. But that's not what people seem to mean when they hand wave about authoritarianism during Covid. Rather such gripes are more often an embrace of that trend!

>Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve.

Yet I bet you kept voting for the same parties that keep passing such laws.

It's almost like American democracy has been dysfunctional and degrading further for more than half a century