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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Here's some more coverage: https://www.cpr.org/2020/09/24/boulder-county-issues-ban-on-...

Here's the text of the order: https://www.bouldercounty.org/families/disease/covid-19/publ...

The text says in part: ""Gathering: more than one individual coming together or being physically near each other for any shared and common purpose, including socializing or participating in any activity together including but not limited to shopping, dining, or exercising. A gathering does not include employees of any business while performing work for that business or any classroom learning activity explicitly permitted by the University of Colorado. Members of the same household while in their shared household space (e.g. a dorm room) together are not considered a gathering.""

They've excluded people at work, so I suppose this allows people in this age range to provide childcare for essential workers, work in health care or at grocery stores, etc.

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> They've excluded people at work, so I suppose this allows people in this age range to provide childcare for essential workers, work in health care or at grocery stores, etc.

How kind of our benevolent overlords. We can still partake in the economic machinery! Just none of that pesky “living your life” stuff.

I’m surprised they haven’t banned laughter yet. It spreads SARS-CoV-2-laden respiratory droplets like nothing else.

Roseanne Barr and Tim Dillon did a podcast recently and there was a part I loved so much, “at this point anyone who can’t laugh - you gotta go.”

You want to find the authoritarians among us? Find the people who are unable to laugh and make it known that no one else should.

Oh believe me, I have found the authoritarians. I did not realize how many of my friends would callously and unquestioningly swallow the narrative and obey.

(Many of my closest friends see through the narrative, partially because I wouldn’t shut up about it once I started reading the research and really realized how big of a mistake we’d made as a society)

It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.

The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.

I think invoking nazism is a surefire way to make sure people hate you. I get what you're saying though and agree.

What's clear to me after the pandemic: most people wouldn't think twice about completely destroying the fabric of normal society (perhaps irrevocably, while also violating fundamental rights) if they believe they're acting morally.

Yeah, I worried the reference to Nazism would set people off. It comes off like Godwin’s law. But I didn’t make the comparison lightly, I literally mean that this type of blind obedience to authority is literally what allows factions like the Nazis to come to power.

In any case, I take solace in the fact that pretty much all of my comments in this thread are more or less equally downvoted :P

I’ve had to stop browsing HN as much during covid because people here tend to be very rabid about this issue. I am shocked how normalized the idea of forcible business closures and total bans on population movement for years (“until the vaccine”) has become. All to avoid a virus that spreads so well that even literal islands (NZ) have been unable to contain it, which has per the CDC a .65% IFR (I personally think the real figure is .3%), and which unlike Influenza does not kill children.

But I digress.

Honestly this just sounds ridiculous, paranoid, and reactionary. I don't know what else to tell you. Yes, people who believe in making the minor personal sacrifice of self quarantining for the greater good, because they trust public health officials and scientific authority figures, are just mindless sheep and would be happy to ban laughter. If you're going to comment on a serious issue like this, make a serious argument. Otherwise, quit polluting the conversation.

I mean if last December you had told people that we would issue stay at home orders and lay off 20 million people in the span of two weeks then keep all that stuff for six months they would have called you ridiculous and paranoid too. And yet here we are

Isn’t it telling that they described a complete ban on gatherings for an entire age range a “minor sacrifice”?

Really shows you how far the overton window shifted.

Also doubly ironic that I got called paranoid for talking about what is literally happening right now, not what I fear might happen.

Yes, completely out of context and without any implied qualifications, such a ban would be too much. But that's not what we're dealing with here, is it? This is not something that will remain in effect for years to come and I think any reasonable person understands that. Yes, I do consider a period of a few weeks or maybe even a couple months of self quarantine a small sacrifice compared with the alternative as I understand it. I was happy to comply with the shutdowns when they were in effect in Colorado earlier this year and I think these young people should also be willing to do it. And I don't waste time kidding myself into thinking I can effectively judge these actions with no expertise in these areas. I'm not an epidemiologist and I'm sure neither are you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22new+normal%22

>"But this doesn’t mean we should go back to the ‘old normal’."

https://www.who.int/westernpacific/emergencies/covid-19/info...

>"There's nothing new about the 'new normal'. Here's why"

>"Normal' has not worked for a majority of the world's population, so why would it start working now? We should use our discomfort to forge a new paradigm instead."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/theres-nothing-new-ab...

Also, here's another comment you made in this article:

> It’s kind of like how everyone thinks that they would have opposed the Nazis because they grew up being taught that Nazis were bad. The truth is, this experiment in mass collective delusion has made it very clear which among us would have spoken out.

> The ones reporting their neighbors for having a gathering or not wearing a mask while watering their lawn would have happily helped participate in genocide. Don’t doubt it.

So yes, you're acting paranoid and not contributing meaningfully to the conversation.

Aside from the part where I didn’t say that you had a good point.

Why are you commenting as "I" in response to a comment directed at __blockcipher__?

Sorry about that. The way HN renders on my phone it looked like you were replying to me.

I stand by the comment. I didn't say that Nazis were invading the country. I said the same unquestioning deference to authority was at play then as it is now. There's nothing paranoid about a reflection on human nature.

> I mean if last December you had told people that we would issue stay at home orders and lay off 20 million people in the span of two weeks then keep all that stuff for six months they would have called you ridiculous and paranoid too. And yet here we are

Much of the country never issued stay at home orders and almost no place has stay at home orders now, so they would have been right to call you inaccurate if perhaps paranoid isn't the right word, as we largely didn't do that, and where we did we didn't keep it for six months.

We are literally talking about a county that just placed a total ban on gatherings for young people, and you’re arguing that it’s paranoid to talk about? How can it be paranoia to talk about what is literally happening? I’m not speculating about some slope we could slide down, I’m saying we’ve already slid down the slope.

I am genuinely perplexed here.

> We are literally talking about a county that just placed a total ban on gatherings for young people, and you’re arguing that it’s paranoid to talk about?

No, I'm saying that the claim specifically made in the grandparents comment about general stay at home orders maintained for 6+ months was false (not paranoid), because much of the country never had a stay-at-home order, and almost all actual stay-at-home orders that were issued were lifted. Had we actually had a hard lockdown nationwide for even a fairly short period of time, we might still be seeing the kind second wave some places are seeing, but we wouldn’t still be in an epic disaster of a first wave, and we probably wouldn’t be seeing the kind of extreme-but-isolated orders you are complaining about now.

Not to mention, all of the so-called stay-at-home orders were totally half-assed and unenforced. They might as well have been called "stay-at-home suggestions". If this one in Boulder is enforced like the rest of the country's "orders" it will be treated as a joke.

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