Well if you look at smoking, we did quite similar things. We let people smoke, it's not forbidden, but don't try to smoke within a restaurant, an indoor space, a flight, etc. Why? Because that's where your secondary smoke can start impacting other people. But smoke at home as much as you want!
The argument is that we're not saving those other lives because we don't think we, as a society, have the right to make those people's choices for them. If your argument is that we do and we'll get to the overweight after we get to the antivaxxers just say it.
What country do you live in? Can you criticize the leader without going to jail? Do union representatives get murdered? Are police there to help you or to extort you?
I live in an actually authoritarian country. Only the most privileged people here don't get vaccinated, and among them it's a very small group, and mostly foreigners. No one is forced to, and no one is being forced to do anything else with their body.
I find this jump to tyranny argument disgusting. How on Earth would that work? In a country where one man can order the military to kill its own citizens there is no logical connection between vaccinations and smoking or obesity.
Americans (and a lot of other nationalities in the West, but mostly Americans) need to gain some perspective on the difference between tyranny and responsibility. I got vaccinated (with a Chinese vaccine, the horror!) because I consider it my duty to my family, my adopted country, and the world.
And guess what? Vaccination has been stupendously effective and our country is almost back to normal. And still the government is not locking up smokers or fat people.
>Americans (and a lot of other nationalities in the West, but mostly Americans) need to gain some perspective on the difference between tyranny and responsibility.
You're right, we do. I for one am happy to take an experimental RNA therapy in hopes a new and better cure can be developed from the results. But it has to be my choice. If the government has the right to shoot me with a novel serum for the sake of public health, what's to stop them from forcing me to expose myself to the virus itself in the next pandemic? Or shooting me with something more permanent if they decide my thought harbours the next dangerous viral pandemic?
You've my sympathies for the state of your country, but I honestly believe if more of your fellow citizens had drawn a bright line around abstract concepts like bodily autonomy, the authoritarians who took it over would have, at the very least, had a much harder time when they were starting out. That's its own kind of responsibility for those of us who don't live in a genuinely authoritarian country yet
I live in the US. Here the police do extort, union representatives have been murdered, and Ben Franklin's own grandson was jailed for criticizing our president adams. However we are certainly pretty low on the authoritarian spectrum, compared to many other countries.
Our own military has done quite horrible things to US citizens, including killing and jailing them in foreign detention centers.
Having spent time in "authoritarian countries", I can tell you even in those countries the common man can often criticize leaders in private, and as I foreigner I have had them confide in me about problems in their country. So it isn't some defense to say that because the common man can complain, it isn't authoritarian.
>And guess what? Vaccination has been stupendously effective and our country is almost back to normal. And still the government is not locking up smokers or fat people.
Despite the dooms-dayers on the internet and media, virtually the same has happened in the US. Nowadays almost all the deaths are the unvaccinated, which for the vast vast majority of them that was their own voluntary decision.
Do strikebreakers get murdered in your country? Because they did, regularly, in the West, and the rhetorical victory of the mafia/socialist-infused labor union movement was so complete, that the murdered were dehumanized as "scabs", and those who protected them, villainized as "union busters".
In the US, you cannot be anti-union and not be under threat of violence, whether it's Larry Elder's staff being assaulted (with hardly any media outcry):
People here love decrying "tyranny" in America and I will either laugh or cry when they their principles come up against the slightest of inconveniences. "Oh I can't go to the closest movie theater unless I get vaccinated and I have to go to the one in another town? Fine I guess I'll get tread on just this one time".
Unfortunately I can't delete my account so I'm just going to change my password without looking.
The government forcibly causing you to be fired from your job because you do not want your body forcefully penetrated against your will, is far from an inconvenience -- it's being shoved into poverty. There are individuals who could die of anaphylaxis or thrombosis from the vaccine if they are predisposed, and issuing mandates that fail to adequately screen for these predispositions is tyrannical.
It would be tyrannical even if the vaccine posed virtually zero health risks, and massively reduced the danger posed by the coronavirus (both of which are true).
Freedom of Association is not some fucking luxury that only spoiled AmeriDumb brats feel entitled to. It's a basic human right, and no government, anywhere, should ever violate the people's to it, as you advocate so naively, and that applies even if it's Joe Biden and the Holy Church of the Democratic Party that is endorsing it. That something so basic to a free world has become associated with being a Republican, and ridiculed, is tragic.
Saving lives cannot be the only consideration. There has to be limits on the power of the state to restrict and compel human behavior. We shouldn't live under medical tyranny.
How about the tyranny of being forced to pay taxes to blow up little kids in Afghanistan at $40k+ a bomb, or the tyranny of being forced under penalty of prison to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons for the Taliban?
You don't think it's a little tyrannical that the tax man can say give us the money to blow up innocent little kids or I'm going to put you in a cage and take your own kids?
The market. I want to be free from it a la Freedom from the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand by Mike Konczal[1]. As much as small government-types don't want to experience government in their everyday lives, I wish not not experience the market and its influence in my everyday life. As much as small government-types feel like they cannot escape government control, I feel like I cannot escape from market control.
>>The market. I want to be free from it a la Freedom from the Market:
So you want to be free from the state of others having the right to engage in mutually voluntary economic interactions? Their right to free assocation, is a tyrannical infringement of your right to dictate how they live? You can't just leave other people and form your own socialist commune somewhere?
