Now that you've seen that. Let's talk about it.
Finance guru gets on TV and says that Chinese ways of enforcing their lock-down is perfectly legit because of the results. Classic the ends justify the means argument.
So, there's a concept in law that I think is a pretty big deal. Many times when you hear about evidence getting thrown out of a trial its due to the "Fruit of the Poison Tree" doctrine. Basically, that means that if evidence is found via illegal means and other evidence is found as a result of illegally obtained evidence, that is fruit of the poisonous tree and it is not admissible.
Now its a child of the exclusionary rule, and there are exceptions. But it is a pretty big part of our legal system used to discourage police from using unsavory means to obtain evidence. Making sure they know ahead of time that if they don't do it right, they won't be able to use it. Now I think we can all agree that preventing police from illegally obtaining evidence is a good thing.
The ends justifying the means is a pretty weak argument, for anything. But fear has taken over most people's heads nowadays. For the most part, people are scared of this disease. Perfectly rational fear. Fear is one of those nifty defense mechanisms we have that have helped keep us alive. Now where it goes off the rails is when people let fear dominate their rational mind. And there's been a shortage of rationality in this situation, in my humble opinion.
Next up, the drones. The scolding drones. If this isn't something that makes your skin crawl I don't want you as a reader. Drones flying around, watching everyone, and giving you government propaganda from the sky. I know we already live in a world that is essentially a surveillance state, but at least it was a little understated before. A security camera here, another in the stop light, they are everywhere but at least they try to make them as unobtrusive as possible so you don't have to have the fact that someone is watching you at the forefront of your mind every minute of the day.
This New Jersey town has decided to go right to having drones flying around telling people to disperse and social distance and whatever else. If that's not a dystopian wet dream I don't know what is. They've thrown all pretenses out the window and have gone all in on watching their citizens all the time, and not feeling the least bit self conscious about it.
And now we come to Wisconsin, and their lovely accent. No, their exceptionally even tempered police who came to tell this woman that she's in violation of the stay at home order because she sent her kid to another person's house to play with their kid. I don't know what the order in Wisconsin is, but do we really want to say that kids can't go play with other kids? Sure no gatherings of more than 10, I'll bite off on that. So you've got mom, dad, kid 1 and kid 2 so you're safely under the threshold.
However, that's not the thing that bothers me the most. Its not even the fact that these cops are talking to this woman like she's a complete imbecile. Or that they're saying Orwellian things like, "Your uncooperative actions will be documented" Its the fact that one of her neighbors called the police on her. Not because she's cooking meth in her trailer. Not because she's running an underage brothel out of her trailer. Not because she is illegally imprisoning illegal immigrants and forcing them to watch Seinfeld reruns. No, they called the cops because her kid went to another kids house.
Something like this happened somewhere before, I saw it in an old newsreel somewhere. I wish I could've understood it better but the narration was in German.
