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Unpopular opinion: watching people struggle and fail or just plain refuse to engage with covid (wear a mask, socially distance, get a vaccine) has really shaken

Unpopular opinion: watching people struggle and fail or just plain refuse to engage with covid (wear a mask, socially distance, get a vaccine) has really shaken my faith in democracy. I was worried after Trumps election in 2016. But it's not a one-off phenomenon. People just behave randomly, they don't calculate risk, they don't care about facts, they're not even able to be self interested as far as I can tell. Just noise. Sometimes the noise seems to get louder. But that's all I can see. Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded.

nvoid 5y ago
I want people to be able to calculate risk for themselves rather than have GOVT decide what risks people can and can't take. If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves, perhaps because they are in their 20s and the average age of covid mortality is 80, then it is up to them and it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do. If you are 90 and have 5 more years left to live, then my all means, stay indoors. Or don't and spend your last years with your family rather than dying alone in some care home that you are locked in and can't leave... Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. This will probably get downvoted/flagged but I wanted to say it.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  When you calculate the risk for "yourself", you're not actually just making a decision for yourself, you're making a decision on the health of those around you, because the existence of a viable breeding ground for the disease keeps it active in the population, and capable of mutating, and escaping vaccines. Besides, the government isn't even forcing you in the sense of "you're going to go to jail if you don't do this." There's forcing you in the sense of "You can't fly on this plane if not vaccinated." Private businesses could refuse you service, like "You're not coming into this movie theater unless you're vaccinated or wearing a mask." Can't libertarians decide who to associate with and if they don't want to associate with non-vaccinated, isn't that their right? Governments force lots of things in democracies. Education is forced for example. Truancy is illegal. You as a parent cannot make a decision to never educate your child in many countries.
  - effie 5y ago
    > the existence of a viable breeding ground for the disease keeps it active in the population, and capable of mutating, and escaping vaccines. You assume that when a person does not get a vaccine, that person is helping to get more people infected. But that does not always happen; many people have natural immunity and in case they are nevertheless infectors, they are quite less effective at infecting others, similar to how vaccinated people seem to be so; and such non-vaccinated person can limit their infecting risk to others in various other ways, such as by wearing a mask in close encounters with strangers and by limiting such contacts. It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19. There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity.
    - cromwellian 5y ago
      Statistically, people who are not vaccinated contribute to the spread of the virus. The fact that any one person who isn't vaccinated may not be infected is not relevant. You're using the existence of a few exceptions to prove the rule. We know there are a few people who were born immune to the HIV virus. Does that mean it's ok for everyone to assume they have this kind of immunity and not practice safe sex? Crazy. > It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19. Except that the people who don't get vaccinated overlap with the people who refuse all of the other mitigations -- many antivax people are also anti-mask, anti-social distancing, anti-lockdown, etc. > There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity. You have no control over which variant you get infected by. If you're not vaccinated, you could get infected first by the Delta variant for example. I mean, you're proposing a quite frankly bizarre process: 1) "natural immunity" vs "vaccine immunity". In many cases, these are identical, for example if you get a vaccine based on a weakened form of the virus. 2) An assumption that "natural immunity" confers some kind of better protection than vaccine immunity. This is unscientific, and in the case of COVID-19, factually wrong. And that's the point of Linus's rant A lot of antivax people use pseudo-scientific reasoning. It's like you bring the same rigor to pandemic prevention that some quack brings to analysis of GOOP supplements.
- jjnoakes 5y ago
  The personal freedom to make choices for one's self should absolutely be up to the individual - but only insofar as those choices only affect the individual making them. Once you talk about things like being contagious and infecting others, personal freedoms must be balanced against societal well-being. Where that balance lies is, of course, where the debate should be. Ignoring one side and focusing solely on the other is unproductive in my opinion.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Your conflating your right to risk yourself (declining a vaccine) with your right to risk others (refusing a mask mandate). Those are very different things. "Do what you want to yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it" is the definition of freedom. That said, any actual calculation of the risks should send people flocking to be vaccinated. But you do you. Just please don't vote.
  - nvoid 5y ago
    My bad, I'm not talking about vaccines here. More replying to this general comment about people that don't comply with governmental decree. Leaving out the fact that GOVT was saying at the start of the pandemic that masks do little to protect you or others and they made a u-turn on that, the real way to let people keep their freedom is to let people decide the risks they want to take. If you are old, fat or otherwise ill, don't go outside if you think you might die? I sounds harsh but don't impinge on my freedom to not have to wear a mask because you can't go for a jog once in a while.
- lazyant 5y ago
  > it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do No, your freedom ends where my starts. If you are propagating a deadly desease it's not about individual freedoms anymore, this is the same as deciding your personal risk is fine with running red lights at intersections; we don't accept that as a society.
- picardythird 5y ago
  Do you wear a seatbelt in the car?
  - nvoid 5y ago
    Yes but no because it is the law. It should be law that car companies provide a seat-belt but not that I wear one. Your one sentence straw-man wont suffice here. Again, it's all about personal risk. I could go climb a cliff face with a rope or I could do it without. I don't need GOVT to tell me not to do the latter.
    - kokanee 5y ago
      Honest question: where is the line? I assume you do want there to be some laws regarding public health and safety. On a spectrum of health/safety violations from terrorism, to murder, to assault, to reckless driving, to spreading a virus during a pandemic, to harassment, to causing a noise complaint - where should the line between legal and illegal be? Edit: although, my question doesn't address your concern about personal risk. But the laws don't address personal risk, they address the public risks caused by your actions. If you don't care about public risks, then my question is a non sequitur.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Did you know that seatbelts save lives besides those of the people wearing them? That in even minor collisions being untethered to a seat can injure others? The justification for mandatory seatbelt laws is the same as the justification for covid mitigations: you’re protecting more than yourself.
      - foolinaround 5y ago
        If the driver is not wearing a seatbelt but the passenger is and the car gets into an accident, would the passenger be worse off than if the driver was wearing the seatbelt? If not, this analogy does not stand.
        5y ago
- V__ 5y ago
  > If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves If one's actions were only risky to themselves, then I would agree with you. However, that is not the case with a pandemic. > Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. Frankly, politicizing mask wearing, fake news, lies and proud ignorance does more damage to democracy than anything else. If everyone would have worn masks from the beginning, we would be in a very different place right now.
  - nvoid 5y ago
    I agree with your second comment but not so much the first. Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Or else you may have a dwindling economy due to excessive spending, people too scared to work and a rapidly inflating currency... I may sound like an armchair epidemiologist but given that there are so many proclaimed 'experts' out there, the bar can't be thaaat high?
    - wtallis 5y ago
      > Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Maybe try getting some real education on infectious diseases. Incubation periods during which you can be contagious, and the generally non-zero latency between becoming symptomatic and highly contagious and getting positive test results back and getting into isolation mean your proposed strategy is stupid.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  Comments like this one explain why I run into so many people blaring music through bluetooth speakers when I go hiking.
cromwellian 5y ago
You've got doctors, presumably educated people who actually learned how DNA, RNA, works, telling lawmakers that vaccines cause people to be interfaced with 5G towers, like what, an X-Men techno-virus? I mean WTF, how can professionals be so INSANE? And it's not just this person, there are lots of QAnon idiots spreading this mindvirus all over the net. https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohio-lawmakers-covid-19-vaccine-can-leave-people-magnetized-interfaced-with-5g-towers/ https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohi...
- the8472 5y ago
  People notice that government officials and the media can be intentionally misleading even when that's well-intended and may later pull a "we have always been at war with oceania". Once that lesson is learned "alternative sources" are a lot easier to believe. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/502890-fauci-why-the-public-wasnt-told-to-wear-masks https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-stay-wrong-longer https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-...
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  You know how when you watch the news and they talk about something that you have first-hand experience of? You instantly realise that they have no clue what they're talking about! Half the article is gibberish, the other is a willful misunderstanding. Then the next article goes on about some topic you don't know, and suddenly you have this nagging suspicion that... hey... maybe they're bullshitting about this too! That observation doesn't just apply to news media. In my own industry, I'm constantly up against peers and colleagues who are highly paid, highly educated consultants. Customers turn to these people for "expert" advice. Most of it is something they picked up in the 1990s that is now thoroughly outdated. The other half is them jumping on board with the latest fad, typically badly. But I have this perspective because I can recognise the bullshit and errors in my own industry. Just like the way I now watch the news much more critically, I am now similarly critical of other professionals such as doctors or lawyers. That said: Go get vaccinated! I'm getting my shot next week, which is the earliest I could possibly get it.
deadite 5y ago
>Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded. HN moderation has failed to prevent the platform from being politicized and split up into rightthink and wrongthink, predominantly by allowing political and emotional shitposts that are behind a thin veil of "tech" related topics backed by HN's nebulous "Guidelines." It's just a mirror image of society itself so if things have devolved here for you, I assure you, things out there are much worse than they appear to be. Such is the price of diversity. You're never going to get to the bottom of an agreement on anything, and for every thing you think is going to improve things, others will say how it will make it worse. Good luck.
- nvoid 5y ago
  Tl;dr a reminder that you are on the internet
- DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
  You have to stop digging if you can't crawl out of your twisted mind anymore :(
rektide 5y ago
I'd love to know how the rest of the world experienced the anti-societal refuseniks of Covid. In America, we've had their ticket for a long time, a persistent extremely vocal segment of society that refuses to get along, that always has very important opinions on other people's business & how to do things, that seems to have created their own social strata on being anti-societal, anti-cooperative, generally just anti-. It's social programming. These people have been raised by their media, their politicians, their tribe, to be like this, to behave like this, to assume always it's other people, it's other forces that are responsible, that are causing problems. Their dogma is that they are good people, their wants are correct, and others are bad. This isn't "people just behave randomly". This is deliberate. This is overt & obvious, a persistent problem, a persistent anti- everyone else faction of America, that has caused a royal stink my entire life.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  There's a great quote from some movie that's stuck in my mind. I'm paraphrasing slightly, because my memory is fuzzy, but it goes something like: "Wow, it's so wonderful to see how you've all expressed your unique individuality by dressing exactly alike."
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I really like this comment, but I'm having a hard time picking out which group you're referring to. Are you talking about the people who "lose faith in democracy" because other people make their own decisions for themselves (however risky those decisions are), or the ones who think it is their duty to run around making decisions for others?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Negative viewpoints garner more attention. I was cornered by a proselytizer the other day who, in typical fashion, proceeded to tell me all about what he's against with no mention of what's so great about his club.
grecy 5y ago
I agree 100% and it's quite scary. We've moved past the "information age" where facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions, and we're in some kind of "selfish wants" age. I don't know if it's a problem with democracy though - we've known for a long time now if you let regular folk vote on it a huge number would vote for absolutely zero tax and society would fall apart because of it, but they'd go down chanting how free they are because they're not paying tax. I wonder if it's a lack of education about critical thinking, or maybe just a few decades of being told we can have whatever we want, making (most/some) people very entitled and self-centred. I'm locked in a quarantine hotel for 14 days right now (entering Australia) and I'm live vlogging it across social media. I'm getting a TON of comments from people who are outraged that this is a violation of my rights, etc. etc. It doesn't occur to them that I had to agree to this quarantine long before I could even book a plane ticket, and I personally think it's a very good protective measure and I'm happy about it. Their outrage about what is happening to me is apparently more relevant and important than my own thoughts about what is happening to me. People seem to think their own personal rights are more important than the rights of society as a whole.
- effie 5y ago
  Those are quite some assumptions you make there. When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? I don't know of such age. Both West and East are driven by ideologies and powerful people whims for a long time. > zero tax and society would fall apart because of it How do you know this? Society is a very general concept, why would it fall apart just because of different economics? Instead of taxes, the government could just print more money, or we could completely change the government so it works on donations instead of taxes. It is hard to predict what would happen, society falling apart is one of them, but not the only one. Structural change of society does not mean it has to fall apart.
  - grecy 5y ago
    > When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? IMHO that was the case from something like the 70s to the 00s, but it could be rose colored glasses. > How do you know this? Without taxes there are no Police. No schools, no publicly funded roads, water, electricity or anything like that (street sweeping, snow clearing, etc.). That's just the very beginning. No EPA. Nobody making or enforcing any kind of order. Nobody even making sure the food for sale is some kind of food. I think it's safe to say without taxes society as we know it would fall apart very rapidly. Sure, would there be LaMOE's (Last Man On Earth) defending their Idaho ranch with all their guns... but in the broader sense everything we know today would stop.
lvs 5y ago
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I suspect it proves your point.
rcurry 5y ago
It’s not irrational for people who aren’t worried about Covid to not worry about it. I didn’t downvote you and I understand your point of view, but you have to take other people’s perspectives into consideration - to me, Covid is a bad flu and I’m not stressing over something that has a much smaller likelihood of killing me than my weekend skydives do.
- c-cube 5y ago
  The vaccine is safer than Covid, by your own metric. How many people did the vaccines kill so far? How many people died of Covid? Same goes for supposed long-term effects. The vaccines might have some, but it's less likely than the virus itself having long-term effects (it even has a name already: "long covid"). If you're young, covid is also much more dangerous than the flu.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Fyi, I think the rate of death (assuming you're over 10 and under 40) for covid is about 0.2% in the west. The chance of dying in a sky dive is about 0.001% I think? So covid is 200 times more dangerous than a skydive. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... That said, I am 100% happy with you making an assessment for your own health. I only start objecting when people (not you) pretend there is no risk or refuse to wear a mask or decline the vaccine because its a conspiracy. We can go back and forth getting the right risk figure and you may be happy with that risk. That's all personal freedom and good faith discussion. When people refuse the facts, that's when it gets frustrating to me. And I think a very big number are doing just that.
Baeocystin 5y ago
For what it's worth, you aren't alone. Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. Unfortunately for us in the states, the past several decades have been ones of increasing partisan bickering, and a loss of a collective sense of civic duty. Median incomes have not kept up with the cost of living for close to 50 years, now, putting the squeeze on even having enough time to think about these things. The zeitgeist on the internet isn't helping, and I think Sort by Controversial ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ ) is less fictional by the day. These things are all bad news. That doesn't mean we're doomed, and I'm not fatalistic. There are lots of people who care, too. And there is a lot of work to be done to shore up the foundations of our country. When I was younger, I lived in countries that did not have a functional civic apparatus. I do not want to see that here.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. I disagree with the bit after the semicolon quite strongly. I described my alternative opinion elsewhere in this thread. Democracy has survived very well without sufficient education; it works because it means representatives from the whole community can negotiate an outcome that addresses their actual concerns. For this to work, you need representatives of the whole community and the ability to negotiate, both of which are hard to find in the current US for various reasons. The representatives need to be motivated to find a negotiated settlement that address their core concerns at least, which is impossible under ideological parties where promotion is predicated on purity. But these conditions aren't very hard to reach, and certainly much easier than the idea of a well-educated electorate. (PS: No one has a "core interest" of, say, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Everyone who has an interest in that could be migrated to other areas: coal miners want respectable and well-paid work; mine owners want the value of their investments to remain. This means that once negotiated settlements are possible, those which are needed but not well understood are possible too, even with poorly educated electorates.) As to the bit before the semicolon, I guess someone must've done studies. Is democracy more stable or less stable than alternative constitutions? How do you even measure stability? Obviously the US hasn't been stable for the whole time since the constitution was written, but it was even able to recover after it lost its footing. I think that alone demonstrates that democracy can be robust (not everyone could vote, but I think the ways in which the US was a democracy were sufficiently clear that it would be wrong to attribute it to some alternative style).
squiggleblaz 5y ago
> Unpopular opinion: watching people struggle and fail or just plain refuse to engage with covid (wear a mask, socially distance, get a vaccine) has really shaken my faith in democracy. As best as I can tell, the reason democratic processes have produced the best government in history isn't because the electorate is making well-reasoned assessment of various policy options. It's because it provides a relatively quick feedback cycle, and because people can vote according to their interests and the wounds of previous policy will get treated. The way to keep it safe from abuse by far right extremists ("populists") is to have broad-based parties that reflect economic classes and which can provide direct connections between the different parts of the community and the political system. Parties based on ideology are less capable of compromise so they're less responsive to genuine needs. A business-owners party and a workers party can agree to free trade or protectionism, mandatory public holidays or freedom of contract: the agreement can be believed to be a win for both sites that makes everyone stronger. But, say, a business-libertarian party can only concede it didn't have the power to force both free trade and freedom of contract, and can't call the law they got through an agreement. Ideology is also something that is interesting to fewer people, so they will have narrower bases, more subject to whim and fancy. Democracy isn't perfect, but is there a better system? It seems like everything that is better than democracy done now is just democracy done better. Do you think it would be better to adopt a Saudi-style absolute monarchy or a PRC-style party state?

nvoid 5y ago

I want people to be able to calculate risk for themselves rather than have GOVT decide what risks people can and can't take. If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves, perhaps because they are in their 20s and the average age of covid mortality is 80, then it is up to them and it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do. If you are 90 and have 5 more years left to live, then my all means, stay indoors. Or don't and spend your last years with your family rather than dying alone in some care home that you are locked in and can't leave... Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. This will probably get downvoted/flagged but I wanted to say it.

cromwellian 5y ago
When you calculate the risk for "yourself", you're not actually just making a decision for yourself, you're making a decision on the health of those around you, because the existence of a viable breeding ground for the disease keeps it active in the population, and capable of mutating, and escaping vaccines. Besides, the government isn't even forcing you in the sense of "you're going to go to jail if you don't do this." There's forcing you in the sense of "You can't fly on this plane if not vaccinated." Private businesses could refuse you service, like "You're not coming into this movie theater unless you're vaccinated or wearing a mask." Can't libertarians decide who to associate with and if they don't want to associate with non-vaccinated, isn't that their right? Governments force lots of things in democracies. Education is forced for example. Truancy is illegal. You as a parent cannot make a decision to never educate your child in many countries.
- effie 5y ago
  > the existence of a viable breeding ground for the disease keeps it active in the population, and capable of mutating, and escaping vaccines. You assume that when a person does not get a vaccine, that person is helping to get more people infected. But that does not always happen; many people have natural immunity and in case they are nevertheless infectors, they are quite less effective at infecting others, similar to how vaccinated people seem to be so; and such non-vaccinated person can limit their infecting risk to others in various other ways, such as by wearing a mask in close encounters with strangers and by limiting such contacts. It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19. There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    Statistically, people who are not vaccinated contribute to the spread of the virus. The fact that any one person who isn't vaccinated may not be infected is not relevant. You're using the existence of a few exceptions to prove the rule. We know there are a few people who were born immune to the HIV virus. Does that mean it's ok for everyone to assume they have this kind of immunity and not practice safe sex? Crazy. > It is not true that getting vaccinated is the only way to help limit the spread of COVID-19. Except that the people who don't get vaccinated overlap with the people who refuse all of the other mitigations -- many antivax people are also anti-mask, anti-social distancing, anti-lockdown, etc. > There is another issue, that many people do not want the vaccine, but they do want natural immunity. Those people actually want to get infected, by a weak variant of the disease, and let the nature do its process and get natural immunity. You have no control over which variant you get infected by. If you're not vaccinated, you could get infected first by the Delta variant for example. I mean, you're proposing a quite frankly bizarre process: 1) "natural immunity" vs "vaccine immunity". In many cases, these are identical, for example if you get a vaccine based on a weakened form of the virus. 2) An assumption that "natural immunity" confers some kind of better protection than vaccine immunity. This is unscientific, and in the case of COVID-19, factually wrong. And that's the point of Linus's rant A lot of antivax people use pseudo-scientific reasoning. It's like you bring the same rigor to pandemic prevention that some quack brings to analysis of GOOP supplements.
jjnoakes 5y ago
The personal freedom to make choices for one's self should absolutely be up to the individual - but only insofar as those choices only affect the individual making them. Once you talk about things like being contagious and infecting others, personal freedoms must be balanced against societal well-being. Where that balance lies is, of course, where the debate should be. Ignoring one side and focusing solely on the other is unproductive in my opinion.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Your conflating your right to risk yourself (declining a vaccine) with your right to risk others (refusing a mask mandate). Those are very different things. "Do what you want to yourself, but leave the rest of us out of it" is the definition of freedom. That said, any actual calculation of the risks should send people flocking to be vaccinated. But you do you. Just please don't vote.
- nvoid 5y ago
  My bad, I'm not talking about vaccines here. More replying to this general comment about people that don't comply with governmental decree. Leaving out the fact that GOVT was saying at the start of the pandemic that masks do little to protect you or others and they made a u-turn on that, the real way to let people keep their freedom is to let people decide the risks they want to take. If you are old, fat or otherwise ill, don't go outside if you think you might die? I sounds harsh but don't impinge on my freedom to not have to wear a mask because you can't go for a jog once in a while.
lazyant 5y ago
> it is their personal freedom to choose what to/not do No, your freedom ends where my starts. If you are propagating a deadly desease it's not about individual freedoms anymore, this is the same as deciding your personal risk is fine with running red lights at intersections; we don't accept that as a society.
picardythird 5y ago
Do you wear a seatbelt in the car?
- nvoid 5y ago
  Yes but no because it is the law. It should be law that car companies provide a seat-belt but not that I wear one. Your one sentence straw-man wont suffice here. Again, it's all about personal risk. I could go climb a cliff face with a rope or I could do it without. I don't need GOVT to tell me not to do the latter.
  - kokanee 5y ago
    Honest question: where is the line? I assume you do want there to be some laws regarding public health and safety. On a spectrum of health/safety violations from terrorism, to murder, to assault, to reckless driving, to spreading a virus during a pandemic, to harassment, to causing a noise complaint - where should the line between legal and illegal be? Edit: although, my question doesn't address your concern about personal risk. But the laws don't address personal risk, they address the public risks caused by your actions. If you don't care about public risks, then my question is a non sequitur.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Did you know that seatbelts save lives besides those of the people wearing them? That in even minor collisions being untethered to a seat can injure others? The justification for mandatory seatbelt laws is the same as the justification for covid mitigations: you’re protecting more than yourself.
    - foolinaround 5y ago
      If the driver is not wearing a seatbelt but the passenger is and the car gets into an accident, would the passenger be worse off than if the driver was wearing the seatbelt? If not, this analogy does not stand.
      - 5y ago
V__ 5y ago
> If one doesn't deem it risky to themselves If one's actions were only risky to themselves, then I would agree with you. However, that is not the case with a pandemic. > Forcing/mandating mask wearing in democratic countries does more damage to democracy. Frankly, politicizing mask wearing, fake news, lies and proud ignorance does more damage to democracy than anything else. If everyone would have worn masks from the beginning, we would be in a very different place right now.
- nvoid 5y ago
  I agree with your second comment but not so much the first. Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Or else you may have a dwindling economy due to excessive spending, people too scared to work and a rapidly inflating currency... I may sound like an armchair epidemiologist but given that there are so many proclaimed 'experts' out there, the bar can't be thaaat high?
  - wtallis 5y ago
    > Infectious disease control 101: Lock up the infected people but leave the healthy alone. Maybe try getting some real education on infectious diseases. Incubation periods during which you can be contagious, and the generally non-zero latency between becoming symptomatic and highly contagious and getting positive test results back and getting into isolation mean your proposed strategy is stupid.
seattle_spring 5y ago
Comments like this one explain why I run into so many people blaring music through bluetooth speakers when I go hiking.

cromwellian 5y ago

You've got doctors, presumably educated people who actually learned how DNA, RNA, works, telling lawmakers that vaccines cause people to be interfaced with 5G towers, like what, an X-Men techno-virus? I mean WTF, how can professionals be so INSANE? And it's not just this person, there are lots of QAnon idiots spreading this mindvirus all over the net. https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohio-lawmakers-covid-19-vaccine-can-leave-people-magnetized-interfaced-with-5g-towers/ https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cleveland-doctor-tells-ohi...

the8472 5y ago
People notice that government officials and the media can be intentionally misleading even when that's well-intended and may later pull a "we have always been at war with oceania". Once that lesson is learned "alternative sources" are a lot easier to believe. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/502890-fauci-why-the-public-wasnt-told-to-wear-masks https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-stay-wrong-longer https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/the-experts-can-...
jiggawatts 5y ago
You know how when you watch the news and they talk about something that you have first-hand experience of? You instantly realise that they have no clue what they're talking about! Half the article is gibberish, the other is a willful misunderstanding. Then the next article goes on about some topic you don't know, and suddenly you have this nagging suspicion that... hey... maybe they're bullshitting about this too! That observation doesn't just apply to news media. In my own industry, I'm constantly up against peers and colleagues who are highly paid, highly educated consultants. Customers turn to these people for "expert" advice. Most of it is something they picked up in the 1990s that is now thoroughly outdated. The other half is them jumping on board with the latest fad, typically badly. But I have this perspective because I can recognise the bullshit and errors in my own industry. Just like the way I now watch the news much more critically, I am now similarly critical of other professionals such as doctors or lawyers. That said: Go get vaccinated! I'm getting my shot next week, which is the earliest I could possibly get it.

deadite 5y ago

>Edit: I've never had a comment sink so fast. Cest la vie. I'm sort of glad other people think human civilisation is working. Maybe my depression just has me jaded. HN moderation has failed to prevent the platform from being politicized and split up into rightthink and wrongthink, predominantly by allowing political and emotional shitposts that are behind a thin veil of "tech" related topics backed by HN's nebulous "Guidelines." It's just a mirror image of society itself so if things have devolved here for you, I assure you, things out there are much worse than they appear to be. Such is the price of diversity. You're never going to get to the bottom of an agreement on anything, and for every thing you think is going to improve things, others will say how it will make it worse. Good luck.

nvoid 5y ago
Tl;dr a reminder that you are on the internet
DeliriumTrigger 5y ago
You have to stop digging if you can't crawl out of your twisted mind anymore :(

rektide 5y ago

I'd love to know how the rest of the world experienced the anti-societal refuseniks of Covid. In America, we've had their ticket for a long time, a persistent extremely vocal segment of society that refuses to get along, that always has very important opinions on other people's business & how to do things, that seems to have created their own social strata on being anti-societal, anti-cooperative, generally just anti-. It's social programming. These people have been raised by their media, their politicians, their tribe, to be like this, to behave like this, to assume always it's other people, it's other forces that are responsible, that are causing problems. Their dogma is that they are good people, their wants are correct, and others are bad. This isn't "people just behave randomly". This is deliberate. This is overt & obvious, a persistent problem, a persistent anti- everyone else faction of America, that has caused a royal stink my entire life.

jiggawatts 5y ago
There's a great quote from some movie that's stuck in my mind. I'm paraphrasing slightly, because my memory is fuzzy, but it goes something like: "Wow, it's so wonderful to see how you've all expressed your unique individuality by dressing exactly alike."
betwixthewires 5y ago
I really like this comment, but I'm having a hard time picking out which group you're referring to. Are you talking about the people who "lose faith in democracy" because other people make their own decisions for themselves (however risky those decisions are), or the ones who think it is their duty to run around making decisions for others?
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Negative viewpoints garner more attention. I was cornered by a proselytizer the other day who, in typical fashion, proceeded to tell me all about what he's against with no mention of what's so great about his club.

grecy 5y ago

I agree 100% and it's quite scary. We've moved past the "information age" where facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions, and we're in some kind of "selfish wants" age. I don't know if it's a problem with democracy though - we've known for a long time now if you let regular folk vote on it a huge number would vote for absolutely zero tax and society would fall apart because of it, but they'd go down chanting how free they are because they're not paying tax. I wonder if it's a lack of education about critical thinking, or maybe just a few decades of being told we can have whatever we want, making (most/some) people very entitled and self-centred. I'm locked in a quarantine hotel for 14 days right now (entering Australia) and I'm live vlogging it across social media. I'm getting a TON of comments from people who are outraged that this is a violation of my rights, etc. etc. It doesn't occur to them that I had to agree to this quarantine long before I could even book a plane ticket, and I personally think it's a very good protective measure and I'm happy about it. Their outrage about what is happening to me is apparently more relevant and important than my own thoughts about what is happening to me. People seem to think their own personal rights are more important than the rights of society as a whole.

effie 5y ago
Those are quite some assumptions you make there. When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? I don't know of such age. Both West and East are driven by ideologies and powerful people whims for a long time. > zero tax and society would fall apart because of it How do you know this? Society is a very general concept, why would it fall apart just because of different economics? Instead of taxes, the government could just print more money, or we could completely change the government so it works on donations instead of taxes. It is hard to predict what would happen, society falling apart is one of them, but not the only one. Structural change of society does not mean it has to fall apart.
- grecy 5y ago
  > When did we ever live in age where "facts and science and raw data are used to drive decisions" ? IMHO that was the case from something like the 70s to the 00s, but it could be rose colored glasses. > How do you know this? Without taxes there are no Police. No schools, no publicly funded roads, water, electricity or anything like that (street sweeping, snow clearing, etc.). That's just the very beginning. No EPA. Nobody making or enforcing any kind of order. Nobody even making sure the food for sale is some kind of food. I think it's safe to say without taxes society as we know it would fall apart very rapidly. Sure, would there be LaMOE's (Last Man On Earth) defending their Idaho ranch with all their guns... but in the broader sense everything we know today would stop.

lvs 5y ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted, but I suspect it proves your point.

rcurry 5y ago

It’s not irrational for people who aren’t worried about Covid to not worry about it. I didn’t downvote you and I understand your point of view, but you have to take other people’s perspectives into consideration - to me, Covid is a bad flu and I’m not stressing over something that has a much smaller likelihood of killing me than my weekend skydives do.

c-cube 5y ago
The vaccine is safer than Covid, by your own metric. How many people did the vaccines kill so far? How many people died of Covid? Same goes for supposed long-term effects. The vaccines might have some, but it's less likely than the virus itself having long-term effects (it even has a name already: "long covid"). If you're young, covid is also much more dangerous than the flu.
LatteLazy 5y ago
Fyi, I think the rate of death (assuming you're over 10 and under 40) for covid is about 0.2% in the west. The chance of dying in a sky dive is about 0.001% I think? So covid is 200 times more dangerous than a skydive. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... That said, I am 100% happy with you making an assessment for your own health. I only start objecting when people (not you) pretend there is no risk or refuse to wear a mask or decline the vaccine because its a conspiracy. We can go back and forth getting the right risk figure and you may be happy with that risk. That's all personal freedom and good faith discussion. When people refuse the facts, that's when it gets frustrating to me. And I think a very big number are doing just that.

Baeocystin 5y ago

For what it's worth, you aren't alone. Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. Unfortunately for us in the states, the past several decades have been ones of increasing partisan bickering, and a loss of a collective sense of civic duty. Median incomes have not kept up with the cost of living for close to 50 years, now, putting the squeeze on even having enough time to think about these things. The zeitgeist on the internet isn't helping, and I think Sort by Controversial ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ ) is less fictional by the day. These things are all bad news. That doesn't mean we're doomed, and I'm not fatalistic. There are lots of people who care, too. And there is a lot of work to be done to shore up the foundations of our country. When I was younger, I lived in countries that did not have a functional civic apparatus. I do not want to see that here.

squiggleblaz 5y ago
> Democracy is inherently fragile; it only succeeds when you have a well-educated electorate interested in the good of the country as a whole, and a large enough percentage of the population with enough wealth that such things are maintainable. I disagree with the bit after the semicolon quite strongly. I described my alternative opinion elsewhere in this thread. Democracy has survived very well without sufficient education; it works because it means representatives from the whole community can negotiate an outcome that addresses their actual concerns. For this to work, you need representatives of the whole community and the ability to negotiate, both of which are hard to find in the current US for various reasons. The representatives need to be motivated to find a negotiated settlement that address their core concerns at least, which is impossible under ideological parties where promotion is predicated on purity. But these conditions aren't very hard to reach, and certainly much easier than the idea of a well-educated electorate. (PS: No one has a "core interest" of, say, emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Everyone who has an interest in that could be migrated to other areas: coal miners want respectable and well-paid work; mine owners want the value of their investments to remain. This means that once negotiated settlements are possible, those which are needed but not well understood are possible too, even with poorly educated electorates.) As to the bit before the semicolon, I guess someone must've done studies. Is democracy more stable or less stable than alternative constitutions? How do you even measure stability? Obviously the US hasn't been stable for the whole time since the constitution was written, but it was even able to recover after it lost its footing. I think that alone demonstrates that democracy can be robust (not everyone could vote, but I think the ways in which the US was a democracy were sufficiently clear that it would be wrong to attribute it to some alternative style).

squiggleblaz 5y ago

> Unpopular opinion: watching people struggle and fail or just plain refuse to engage with covid (wear a mask, socially distance, get a vaccine) has really shaken my faith in democracy. As best as I can tell, the reason democratic processes have produced the best government in history isn't because the electorate is making well-reasoned assessment of various policy options. It's because it provides a relatively quick feedback cycle, and because people can vote according to their interests and the wounds of previous policy will get treated. The way to keep it safe from abuse by far right extremists ("populists") is to have broad-based parties that reflect economic classes and which can provide direct connections between the different parts of the community and the political system. Parties based on ideology are less capable of compromise so they're less responsive to genuine needs. A business-owners party and a workers party can agree to free trade or protectionism, mandatory public holidays or freedom of contract: the agreement can be believed to be a win for both sites that makes everyone stronger. But, say, a business-libertarian party can only concede it didn't have the power to force both free trade and freedom of contract, and can't call the law they got through an agreement. Ideology is also something that is interesting to fewer people, so they will have narrower bases, more subject to whim and fancy. Democracy isn't perfect, but is there a better system? It seems like everything that is better than democracy done now is just democracy done better. Do you think it would be better to adopt a Saudi-style absolute monarchy or a PRC-style party state?