Shanghai is a massive prison while spreading Covid in the U.S. is the essence of freedom?
MAGAworld thinks wearing masks indoors and on planes is tyranny?
CNN’s “This is the video Chinese censors don’t want you to see or share” is classic clickbait. But the story itself involves a montage video documenting Shanghai’s nearly five-week lockdown. Residents freaked out by harsh anti-Covid measures compiled it and are sharing and re-sharing it online as quickly as censors can block it. The video itself is a string of audio clips. CNN’s coverage is more visually disturbing.
BBC:
Shanghai’s 25 million residents have been shut in their homes for weeks while officials try to contain a severe Covid-19 outbreak.
The six-minute montage features audio clips of the local population criticising insufficient food supplies and complaining about poor medical conditions.
“We haven’t eaten for days now,” one person can be heard pleading.
“This virus can’t kill us. Starvation can,” another man says.
The video, titled The Voice of April, was being widely shared on the popular Chinese platforms Weibo and WeChat.
The Shanghai lockdown is being lifted in stages.
On this side of the Pacific, freedom is being redefined situationally by conservative judges, says Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick in conversation with Larry Gostin of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. They discuss Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s opinion striking down the Biden administration’s requirement that passengers on trains, busses, and airplanes wear masks.
Lithwick is not only disturbed by Mizelle’s reasoning on “sanitation” rules enforceable by the CDC, but by her definition of “liberty”:
Dahlia Lithwick: She writes that people are forcibly being “removed from their airplane seats, denied boarding at the bus steps, turned away at station doors, all on the suspicion that they will spread a disease. Indeed, the mask mandate enlists local governments, airport employees, flight attendants, ride sharing drivers to enforce removal measures.”
She is making this massive liberty point. And it’s such a funny thing to invoke the idea that you have vast liberty rights to get on planes without a mask, but you actually don’t have those liberty rights in a whole bunch of other contexts, including reproductive freedom.
Larry Gostin: Yeah, that’s right. Let me just dig in a little further on these things. Just from a commonsense point of view and for your listeners, if truly the CDC only had the power to sanitize, it would be useless. Sanitation is useless against COVID-19. It could do nothing to protect the American public. And then, on liberty, I’ve been just struck by the modern conservative ideological notion of liberty, because traditionally, if you look at conservatism, stopping the spread of infectious diseases was always the exception to liberty.
That is, you have a liberty interest to do anything you want to your own body that is self-regarding behavior, but nobody has the liberty of transmitting a potentially lethal infectious disease to another person. That’s never been the understanding of liberty since John Stuart Mill. I know of no intellectual position that would say that a person has the right to take measures that are likely to transmit an infection to others that could potentially kill them.
The right has reduced the rule of law to “for thee but not for me.” The crowd that once wagged fingers at the left for what it deemed moral relativism has revealed itself as unbound by any rules it does not wish to follow. This applies to both the administrative state and to personal behavior. After all, Donald John Trump is the right’s patron saint of “Do your own thing.”
Neighbors are at risk. People with compromised immune systems risk death from Covid. And children too young for the vaccine. Even a minor case can do damage to people’s brains and hearts. But no. Looking out for one’s neighbors is no longer as “Christian” as expressing one’s glorious Self in defiance of reason, science or self-preservation. Decisions on public health affecting whole communities has been left to the “do your own research” people.
Gostin: The America we live in is just do it, no matter what the cost. In this case, the cost is death. But you just stand by your guns and you make your political point. If we can’t come together in a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis, I don’t know when we can. … And so I think conservatives should be careful what they wish for. Because one day there will be a really major threat to America and you don’t want CDC to be diffident.
Where the Chinese are too hot on social responsibility and government maintaining order, the American right is too cold.
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