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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the comments on that blog are a dumpster fire.

I know it's probably not "Russian bots", but...

Two of the comments post the same CDC 2017 list, and both come from twitter accounts with 0 posts (one is 100% retweets of anti-"liberal" content). I'm never sure how plausible it is for someone to have the time to sit on twitter all day just to RT these things and then jump onto rando blogs to leave long comments like these.

Edit

I think the OP is referring to the commenters on Mark Cuban's blog (and not the ones on HN)

Judging by my facebook, these people are probably real. There aren't a lot of them but in the last month they've been getting more vocal.

It’s likely they get these words and phrases from a popular tv network, radio program or podcast. The fact they can’t spell them makes it less likely they read them from a popular columnist or blogger.

HN doesn't usually fare that much better with COVID-19. It got politicized in the US, so there is a partisan faction that is going to parrot or at the very least, try to explain away, whatever the federal line of the day is, no matter how crazy.

I don't think I see many people arguing appeals to the party line. I'm probably posting more about it because I'm frustrated that, while I despise the current white house admin, I do think the lockdowns as implemented are likely to do more harm than good, especially as time goes on. I hate getting lumped in with the president, or having it be assumed that the president's line of rhetoric is representative of my thinking. I hate seeing people post dumb entitled shit about how the lockdown only hurts the rich and anyone who thinks otherwise is fine with killing people. There's so much garbage on both sides of the issue, but unlike most political issues, this one hits home for almost everyone.

No one wants or thinks the lockdowns are a long-term solution. They were put in place to :

1) Stop the health care system from being slammed.

2) Buy time for testing/tracing/isolation, and get enough PPE for health care workers.

The fact that we are squandering that time is a travesty that has a cost measured in lives, and billions of dollars as the economy worsens.

Anecdotally, many, many people think lockdowns are a long term solution that will lead to global eradication.

> I do think the lockdowns as implemented are likely to do more harm than good, especially as time goes on.

I completely disagree. Places are very likely to be shutdown regardless, whether due to government authority or the virus rampaging the workforce. One of those is more permanent than the other.

We could send people back to work, but doing so safely requires effective testing & equipment. The USA bungled their response to the crisis, and so it has neither of those things. Which means reopening the economy at this point is probably going to sacrifice a lot more lives.

The entire point of the lockdown was to buy enough time to put into place the stuff we need to safely reopen. And clearly that didn't happen.

> The entire point of the lockdown was to buy enough time to put into place the stuff we need to safely reopen. And clearly that didn't happen.

That sounds like a pretty good argument supporting the idea that lockdowns as implemented are likely to do more harm than good?

To Mark's credit, he's down in the muck replying to their (batshit crazy) comments and throwing it right back in their faces.

It would be smarter to hire a team of social media experts to do that for him, and rotate out the point person through the decon shower and then into the kittens+puppies room whenever they get too much crazy on them.

Internet comments almost always are, outside of a few niche communities. HN seems to have some of the better discussions on the internet, but it's obviously not perfect either.

I installed the `Shut Up` Firefox extension and now only see comments on places where I actually, actively, want to see the conversation. It changed my experience of the internet.

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