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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

This suggests younger cohorts need robust efforts to protect their rights when continued curtailment is attempted by those who aren’t offering up sufficient compensation and recourse for the impacted.

Can’t expect a generation to go through two economic catastrophes (GFC, Covid) without support and expect positive results. Things will just go from bad to worse.

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Perhaps they should vote.

Ah but that’s the irony. In the US the young overwhelmingly vote for the side that supports these authoritarian shutdowns. I remember when the authoritarians were on the right and the freedom lovers on the left. Oh, how times have changed.

(Compare South Dakota, right-leaning and NEVER locked down, to my home state of California, which is so democrat-leaning that we’re a de facto single party state)

Enforcing sensible public health policy in the middle of a raging, deadly, global pandemic is hardly authoritarian. We are being asked to put a little piece of cloth over our faces and to stay at home when we don’t have to go out. Yet people are acting like we are being loaded onto the trains. Have we so completely lost our sense of perspective?

We're talking here about an order to prohibit all gatherings among young people. That's a huge restriction of 1a right to peaceable assembly.

I happen to think mask mandates are ridiculous too but that's besides the point.

It is not without precedent. Courts have upheld government's power to enforce curfews, which limit gatherings of adults, to protect public safety and property. I would like to see a court weigh in the constitutionality of a curfew for the narrow purpose of protecting the public from a pandemic. You may end up being right. I don't think the SCOTUS has weighed in on curfews yet.

I'd argue that younger people are less likely to vote because they're less likely to find politicians who they want to vote for, so just telling them to vote largely misses the point.

> I'd argue that younger people are less likely to vote because they're less likely to find politicians who they want to vote for, so just telling them to vote largely misses the point.

So vote and get active in a political party, then?

The level of involvement in politics required to influence who's on the ballot is quite a big commitment, and I think it's entirely reasonable for people to expect representation even if they don't have time for that.

The young can never outvite the old because the old are 65-90, but the young are 18-25 at best. The latter cohort is by definition several times smaller.

Why are 16 year old 'too immature' to vote by 90 year olds eligible? You can vote even if you are mentally ill.

Do schoolchildren have no interests at all that deserve at least some representation? Imagine we had a few representatives in parloament talking about their issues, that would probably improve discourse.

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