I want to play devil's advocate.

COVID19 death count is probably on par with flu deaths of yesteryears because the masks and the lockdown worked. People panicked and shutdown their economy and sat at home, so the COVID19 did not spread far and wide as Spanish flu did, but it did reach as many people as flu did without any masks and lockdowns.

@JFK_NOSCOPEZ_420
All fair, IF the numbers where not manipulated.

For me, the bigger issue is the State's YUGE (sorry, couldn't resist) restriction of individual rights.

@Salyer The numbers are certainly exaggerated which like you said proves that selling your freedoms for security worked.

If the government didn't make people wear masks, I am sure the REITs that own the malls and corporations than own the supermarkets, theme parks, and hotels, movie theatres would. Both ways your natural rights would be violated either by corporations or governments.

@JFK_NOSCOPEZ_420 If a private company says I have to wear a mask to do business with them, I have a choice. If the State mandates, I don't. So, no, not the same thing...

@Salyer Don't you think the recent wave of corporate censorship and tyranny proves non-state actors can act like state and make social life difficult? At least with a government during an election year you can vote out bad actors and elect a different set of tyrants.

@JFK_NOSCOPEZ_420
1 - how is that voting out bad actors working? lol!

2- Voting with dollars is more powerful, it may not eliminate some companies, but others will step in and pick up niches that serve those dollars not going to the one's being difficult.

@Salyer Voting doesn't help. Neither does revolution. All it does is shuffle the elites.

Boycott is not easy when corporations are structured like this:

@JFK_NOSCOPEZ_420 Never said it would be easy... lol! We are moving to decentralization, Bitcoin, Mastadon, buying food locally, more and more will be moving that way. It will take some time, but at some point it will accelerate.

@Salyer In that case we need to make the Boycott easier by being offensive also. Throwing ever changing standards of political correctness at corporate networks and scattering its users by making corporations more tyrannical and unfriendly, should be our goal too, as it currently is for the far left.

But we should also built dencetralized and federated platforms for non-corporate non-state forms of social interaction.