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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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