Seriously?
We (the West, I'm not from the UK) are losing our freedom at an unimaginable speed even a few years ago and you think freedom is negotiable? I find this appalling how easy we ease into a dictatorship everywhere in Europe.
ALL our freedoms are attacked: the social media censorship reached crazy levels lately, and let's not talk about democracy given the disgusting spectacle the US has shown this year (my country doesn't fare any better).
When someone is condemned to financial ruin because her shop is not allowed to open, this is not a matter of self entitlement, yes I think these are the beginnings of dictatorship.
As I said I'm not from the UK but as far as I know people in London had more freedom during the WWII aerial bombings.
Prior to the internet you could for the most part visually distinguish between the crazy and the legitimate - the crazy was in crayon on cardboard scraps, full of misspellings. The higher quality crazy was type written on a misaligned sheet of paper, thick with whiteout, still full of misspellings. The legit was professionally edited and published. Not 100% of the time, but a good fraction of the time.
Now we have spell checkers and grammar checkers and blog services like medium that make everything look really really good. That visual heuristic is gone. We need a way to invert our current equilibrium of "it is easy to get bad information out, and hard to get good information out" at least back to how it was: "it is hard to get good information out, but it is even harder to get really bad information out." That isn't censorship.
As for democracy in the US, as a US citizen I can tell you it is on the ropes, mostly due to social media, but it is better off today than it was four years ago just because people are at least starting to think about how to get social media under control.
Every freedom my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents had I have, and more. I'm hard pressed to identify a single one that is under attack.
And you should really familiarize yourself with the actual government response in the UK and US during World War II. The censorship regime was extensive, far more so than anything we've seen in recent memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship
Furthermore, rationing of food, fuel, and other commodities was extensive. In the UK, this included substantial control of the operating hours, prices, and even the menus of restaurants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...
On the other hand, people are actually dying of Covid. Given the choice I'd take financial ruin over death.
There are massive costs associated with lockdowns, most of which we can probably only judge accurately once everything is over, and certainly there are second order effects which cost lives also. Such as suicides due to depression amplified by social isolation.
Those costs should be factored in. It's not as simple as a blanket "people are dying so everything is justified".
That seems to be the most humane option. Make it illegal to evict people, provide them with a reasonable base income that allows them to lead a dignified life through the lockdown, and then shut everything down for a little while.
Suggesting that the lockdown is synonymous with loss of livelihood is exactly the problem here. Surely the same elected officials that have the power to close everything down also have the power to authorize emergency payments to those impacted by the lockdown.
I tend to communicate quite drily - that's often hard to put across online.
It drives me nuts when people talk about freedom, they have no actual idea what freedom is or takes and their actions undermine it. Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I like with no consequences", but that's what people really want.
Freedom is just a better sounding word than selfishness these days :(
<Steps-down-from-soapbox>
Depends on your definition of freedom. The issue with this kind of freedom is that your freedom encroaches on other people's freedoms, so most societies agreed that we should have less freedom in favor of fairness.
Exactly where the trade-off is to be made is subjective and cannot be derived from facts alone.
We have a lot of freedoms that encroach on other people's freedoms, it's impossibly to make a clear cut on where fair ends and personal freedom begins.
Allowing people the freedom to sell sugar will inevitably lead to more diabetes and earlier death. It tastes good and it's addictive.
Sugar costs a lot of people some of their freedom to live and move. But if we didn't allow selling sugar we would take away the seller's freedom and the freedom to choose from the consumer.
