I agree with Larry Correia and his opinion on George Takei:
There is no false equivalence at all. Takei is speaking of using coercion (whether government/societal, or in this case both) to take away freedoms, with the justification of “the greater good.”
Now, you might personally think that this particular “greater good” is worth taking away freedoms. Don’t matter. It’s still equivalent. Let’s try it out. The threat is Y. The freedom is X.”
A lot of people are angry about ( Y ). I don’t care, because we need to do something about (X )for the greater good. The needs of society are more important.”.
Now, go through and stick most of history’s atrocities in there and see if they don’t fit.
Germans were scared of Jews. Something had to be done for the greater good of society. Turks didn’t like Armenians. Stalin really didn’t like uppity Ukrainians. The Japanese are going to be saboteurs loyal to the empire. Somebody had better sterilize those natives. Hey, let’s see how long it takes for black dudes to die of syphillis in the name of science! So on and so forth.
But this is DIFFERENT than those.
Why? Why is it different? Because you personally are scared of this X and think Y is worth it? Because guess what? All of those people said the same damn thing.
We see this bullshit every single day. We need to take away guns for the greater good. We need to take away free speech for the greater good. You need to have a social credit score for the greater good.
It’s all authority pandering to fear to get more power. Every fucking time.
So spare me the false equivalence. It is extremely equivalent.
But this isn’t as bad! It’s just one little “common sense” thing! Then it’ll go back to normal. Uh huh… And the Nazis didn’t get elected and start gassing Jews a week later either. The Holocaust happened through a series of escalating events, each of which was a crisis (according to the authorities) which required slightly more action. 1935 was not the same as 1945. Duh.
So I’d rather not start down that path of declaring some groups of humans as untermensch who need to be managed by the state for the greater good, AT ALL.