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How much of this is about 'masks' and really about Rand Paul calling for mass civil disobedience against COVID restrictions? Here's the full video: https://tw

How much of this is about 'masks' and really about Rand Paul calling for mass civil disobedience against COVID restrictions? Here's the full video: https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1424399282447298563 https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1424399282447298563

natural219 5y ago
mass civil disobedience against COVID restrictions is not only awesome, it a very explicit and central civic value of the American political mythology. I can't emphasize enough how bizarre and soviet-esque that this is even on the table as a contentious issue these days.
- kingTug 5y ago
  Probably has something to do with the 600k+ dead Americans.
  - NonContro 5y ago
    Not much evidence that any of these interventions would have prevented that: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/state-vs-state https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/state-vs-state The major underlying factor behind the deaths (apart from just old age) is obesity, secondly probably air pollution, but these factors are ignored.
  - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
    Every year, ~647,000 Americans die from heart disease alone. Even if the COVID death numbers aren't over-inflated, I guarantee you that if I were to time-travel to 2019 and ask you if you think that it would be worth precipitating a global supply chain disruption, missed schooling and medical appointments for children around the globe, both first and third world, and the greatest erosion in civil liberties in Western society since at least WW2 (since we've already eclipsed 9/11 in loss of liberty, shockingly)...all over 4 million and change deaths globally, you would think that was crazy
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      I, for one, wouldn't think that was crazy, no. Not when the preventability of those deaths is proportional to how well people stick to pandemic mitigation protocol. Very, very few people are willing to just shrug and say "600,000 preventable deaths is acceptable" in this context. The pandemic creates challenges that are uniquely tuned to impact the American "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. Pandemic mitigation is a serious collective action problem (at the limit, it wouldn't take more than total isolation for four weeks to completely burn the virus out... And that's never going to happen in the United States, nor should anyone expect it to).
      - lupire 5y ago
        > "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. I would love a source for this, because "rugged individualism" is the reason why US has the worst healthcare and homelessness of developed nations.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        Agreed. Those are two more circumstances that it doesn't work well for. It does seem to do a decent job of encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurism.
        __blockcipher__ 5y ago
        People travel from all around the world to obtain US healthcare. Say what you will about affordability (I would contend that the main problem is that we don't have a free market for healthcare, we have an unholy crony capitalist hybrid system), but the quality of the healthcare itself is unparalleled anywhere in the world. If you're at serious risk of death you want to be in a US hospital. I hate the trend of conflating "access to affordable healthcare" with the actual healthcare itself.
        adventured 5y ago
        > and homelessness of developed nations That's false by a large margin. The US rate of homelessness has been massively reduced over the past 20-30 years and is comparable to Austria. The US homelessness rate is far below Sweden, France, Britain, Australia, Canada. It's also below the Netherlands. The housing first program by the US worked exceptionally well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
  - rwcarlsen 5y ago
    To say nothing about the costs of globally increased hunger, unrest, depression, deaths of despair, neglected+abused children, and on and on - that billions of people in the world will continue to pay for years to come in order to try to save at most a couple million lives of people with mostly significant pre-existing conditions and of advanced years that were mostly "on their way out". Why not forget about the future and younger generation - they don't matter - we need to save the people that are going to die soon anyway at _all costs_! \s
    - kenjackson 5y ago
      Covid sucks but for most of the population it is now just an inconvenience to mitigate it. We don’t need to do big lockdowns anymore. I’m ok to take a vaccine or wear a mask indoors to save ten million lives. I think you protest too much about simply wearing a mask or getting a shot.
- aisengard 5y ago
  YouTube pulled the TidePod-eating challenge videos because they endangered public health. This is no different.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    Hopefully they pull the fat acceptance videos too. I believe your post is an isolated demand for rigor: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
- version_five 5y ago
  I see you'd been here a lot longer than I have so you know you're fighting a lost battle. I am surprised how tech folks, that I always thought had a libertarian bent, have gone full on religious conformist due to covid. I like to read HN for the tech discussions and have a bad habit of getting drawn in to these silly religious things. All I can say is I hope the mainstream extremist view here is not representative of real people. But of course Covid is killing people, so we should abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms to continue the great work we've done stopping it.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > But of course Covid is killing people, so we should abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms to continue the great work we've done stopping it. I'm entirely confused by this sentiment. What's been abandoned? Serious question, I have no clue what people mean when they post stuff like this.
    - rajin444 5y ago
      Even Biden admitted the moratorium is unconstitutional. Nobody seems to care.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        Half the population had no problem trying to actually overthrow a constitutional election earlier this year and the previous President still claims it was all rigged. I'm not at all surprised that Biden's actions are not inspiring much outrage.
      - handrous 5y ago
        Ok, so the eviction moratorium? Maybe we just have very different historical perspectives, and that's why I don't get it. "Abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms" seems like wild hyperbole, given how the country usually operates, and has basically forever. We're still way on the "more free" side of things, as far as the spectrum in which the US has historically operated, by a long shot, and I don't see a strong trend the other way.
- nhutton1 5y ago
  Is it awesome? It wouldn't be awesome if you replaced covid here with HIV (HIV restrictions being donating blood and having unprotected sex)
csomar 5y ago
What's exactly wrong with mass civil disobedience? If anything, it shows that you have problems with your political system; and that the current ruler has lost the narrative.
- version_five 5y ago
  According to prevailing wisdom, civil disobedience means you're a X-ist, denier gun nut who has fallen for disinformation. No room for questioning the official narrative, lives are at stake.
  - nielsbot 5y ago
    Prevailing wisdom in what circles?
- johncessna 5y ago
  Are we still supposed to be 'Resisting' or is that over with now?
  - Loveaway 5y ago
    Yes resist! Do you want wear a mask for the rest of your life? Do you want annual mandatory injections of pathogens into your body? Do you want to check-in/check-out with your QR code ID wherever you go, that comes with an expiration date, enables mass surveillance, and can be disabled at a whim? A dictated narrative, censorship of opposition, rationality forbidden? Or do you think you are fine with this and want to live in permanent cognitive dissonance?
    - Valectar 5y ago
      You act like this is the first time in the history of the planet a country has enacted measures to stop the spread of disease. It's not, we've done it before, and the world didn't collapse because people were inconvenienced temporarily. https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/mask-resistance-during-a-pandemic-isnt-new-1918-many-americans-were-slackers https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/mask-r...
adventured 5y ago
Kind of like how the Europeans have been routinely performing mass civil disobedience against Covid restrictions over the past several months? Just about every other day I see a new protest against Covid restrictions involving tens of thousands of people in a random European nation (Spain, Italy, Britain, France, etc). Or how about the giant anti-lockdown protest in Sydney in July. Rand Paul should be calling for civil disobedience. The authorities have been wrong over and over and over and over again about Covid. They've lied, over and over and over again. They're not worthy of being trusted. And the typical cloth mask most people are wearing doesn't work for shit against Delta, it's entirely a sick joke on the public at this point. And lately the grotesque political elites have been telling the public to do one thing, while they party at large gatherings entirely without masks, blatantly mocking the public.

natural219 5y ago

mass civil disobedience against COVID restrictions is not only awesome, it a very explicit and central civic value of the American political mythology. I can't emphasize enough how bizarre and soviet-esque that this is even on the table as a contentious issue these days.

kingTug 5y ago
Probably has something to do with the 600k+ dead Americans.
- NonContro 5y ago
  Not much evidence that any of these interventions would have prevented that: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/state-vs-state https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/state-vs-state The major underlying factor behind the deaths (apart from just old age) is obesity, secondly probably air pollution, but these factors are ignored.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  Every year, ~647,000 Americans die from heart disease alone. Even if the COVID death numbers aren't over-inflated, I guarantee you that if I were to time-travel to 2019 and ask you if you think that it would be worth precipitating a global supply chain disruption, missed schooling and medical appointments for children around the globe, both first and third world, and the greatest erosion in civil liberties in Western society since at least WW2 (since we've already eclipsed 9/11 in loss of liberty, shockingly)...all over 4 million and change deaths globally, you would think that was crazy
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I, for one, wouldn't think that was crazy, no. Not when the preventability of those deaths is proportional to how well people stick to pandemic mitigation protocol. Very, very few people are willing to just shrug and say "600,000 preventable deaths is acceptable" in this context. The pandemic creates challenges that are uniquely tuned to impact the American "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. Pandemic mitigation is a serious collective action problem (at the limit, it wouldn't take more than total isolation for four weeks to completely burn the virus out... And that's never going to happen in the United States, nor should anyone expect it to).
    - lupire 5y ago
      > "rugged individualism" approach to problem solving that works well in most circumstances. I would love a source for this, because "rugged individualism" is the reason why US has the worst healthcare and homelessness of developed nations.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Agreed. Those are two more circumstances that it doesn't work well for. It does seem to do a decent job of encouraging and rewarding entrepreneurism.
      - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
        People travel from all around the world to obtain US healthcare. Say what you will about affordability (I would contend that the main problem is that we don't have a free market for healthcare, we have an unholy crony capitalist hybrid system), but the quality of the healthcare itself is unparalleled anywhere in the world. If you're at serious risk of death you want to be in a US hospital. I hate the trend of conflating "access to affordable healthcare" with the actual healthcare itself.
      - adventured 5y ago
        > and homelessness of developed nations That's false by a large margin. The US rate of homelessness has been massively reduced over the past 20-30 years and is comparable to Austria. The US homelessness rate is far below Sweden, France, Britain, Australia, Canada. It's also below the Netherlands. The housing first program by the US worked exceptionally well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
- rwcarlsen 5y ago
  To say nothing about the costs of globally increased hunger, unrest, depression, deaths of despair, neglected+abused children, and on and on - that billions of people in the world will continue to pay for years to come in order to try to save at most a couple million lives of people with mostly significant pre-existing conditions and of advanced years that were mostly "on their way out". Why not forget about the future and younger generation - they don't matter - we need to save the people that are going to die soon anyway at _all costs_! \s
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    Covid sucks but for most of the population it is now just an inconvenience to mitigate it. We don’t need to do big lockdowns anymore. I’m ok to take a vaccine or wear a mask indoors to save ten million lives. I think you protest too much about simply wearing a mask or getting a shot.
aisengard 5y ago
YouTube pulled the TidePod-eating challenge videos because they endangered public health. This is no different.
- rajin444 5y ago
  Hopefully they pull the fat acceptance videos too. I believe your post is an isolated demand for rigor: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
version_five 5y ago
I see you'd been here a lot longer than I have so you know you're fighting a lost battle. I am surprised how tech folks, that I always thought had a libertarian bent, have gone full on religious conformist due to covid. I like to read HN for the tech discussions and have a bad habit of getting drawn in to these silly religious things. All I can say is I hope the mainstream extremist view here is not representative of real people. But of course Covid is killing people, so we should abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms to continue the great work we've done stopping it.
- handrous 5y ago
  > But of course Covid is killing people, so we should abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms to continue the great work we've done stopping it. I'm entirely confused by this sentiment. What's been abandoned? Serious question, I have no clue what people mean when they post stuff like this.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    Even Biden admitted the moratorium is unconstitutional. Nobody seems to care.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      Half the population had no problem trying to actually overthrow a constitutional election earlier this year and the previous President still claims it was all rigged. I'm not at all surprised that Biden's actions are not inspiring much outrage.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Ok, so the eviction moratorium? Maybe we just have very different historical perspectives, and that's why I don't get it. "Abandon centuries of liberal democratic tradition and hard fought freedoms" seems like wild hyperbole, given how the country usually operates, and has basically forever. We're still way on the "more free" side of things, as far as the spectrum in which the US has historically operated, by a long shot, and I don't see a strong trend the other way.
nhutton1 5y ago
Is it awesome? It wouldn't be awesome if you replaced covid here with HIV (HIV restrictions being donating blood and having unprotected sex)

csomar 5y ago

What's exactly wrong with mass civil disobedience? If anything, it shows that you have problems with your political system; and that the current ruler has lost the narrative.

version_five 5y ago
According to prevailing wisdom, civil disobedience means you're a X-ist, denier gun nut who has fallen for disinformation. No room for questioning the official narrative, lives are at stake.
- nielsbot 5y ago
  Prevailing wisdom in what circles?
johncessna 5y ago
Are we still supposed to be 'Resisting' or is that over with now?
- Loveaway 5y ago
  Yes resist! Do you want wear a mask for the rest of your life? Do you want annual mandatory injections of pathogens into your body? Do you want to check-in/check-out with your QR code ID wherever you go, that comes with an expiration date, enables mass surveillance, and can be disabled at a whim? A dictated narrative, censorship of opposition, rationality forbidden? Or do you think you are fine with this and want to live in permanent cognitive dissonance?
  - Valectar 5y ago
    You act like this is the first time in the history of the planet a country has enacted measures to stop the spread of disease. It's not, we've done it before, and the world didn't collapse because people were inconvenienced temporarily. https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/mask-resistance-during-a-pandemic-isnt-new-1918-many-americans-were-slackers https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/wellness-prevention/mask-r...

adventured 5y ago

Kind of like how the Europeans have been routinely performing mass civil disobedience against Covid restrictions over the past several months? Just about every other day I see a new protest against Covid restrictions involving tens of thousands of people in a random European nation (Spain, Italy, Britain, France, etc). Or how about the giant anti-lockdown protest in Sydney in July. Rand Paul should be calling for civil disobedience. The authorities have been wrong over and over and over and over again about Covid. They've lied, over and over and over again. They're not worthy of being trusted. And the typical cloth mask most people are wearing doesn't work for shit against Delta, it's entirely a sick joke on the public at this point. And lately the grotesque political elites have been telling the public to do one thing, while they party at large gatherings entirely without masks, blatantly mocking the public.