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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

This feels like it's just to shame everyone based on very few eccentrics. I'm sure most people in SD agree COVID is real, but it's also not a very densely populated state with small cities, and the governors response seems appropriate. It's keep the economy from totally collapsing.

I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days.

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> I drove to Sioux Falls a few weeks ago, just to be some place normal. It was nice just being able to go into a brew pub or an indoor restaurant, and talk to people. Too bad it was only for a few days.

Frivolous travel for the express purpose of not social distancing during the throes of a pandemic... smh, what a prick.

Traveling makes absolutely no difference when both the place you're traveling from and the place you're traveling to have widespread virus transmission.

Are there still people who believe it is just "a few eccentrics"? As someone who has a lot of them in my direct family, extended family, and even Facebook friends, my perception is that partisanship has reached a point where there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right. And in the case of covid19, it feels like at least 10% don't fully believe in it (the level of doubt varying by individual and situational circumstances, like needing immediate medical assistance vs being in good health).

>there is literal mass delusion out there far left and far right.

What delusion is the "far left" believing in, in your opinion?

A super important component is that with these extremists, I can tell them exactly what I think and believe, and they will contradict me to my face and say no, that is not true, you believe x y z. And the criteria for the claim is simply that I'm not in wholehearted agreement with them. The degree doesn't matter, the ideology demands absolutely submission.

It is a mass delusion to say a substantial portion of the population is unable to self report their own beliefs - to say that your group knows better what millions of outsiders to the group think

I think the attacks on an honest intellectual interested in the truth not the answer an ideology demands, specifically the attempt to cancel Steven Pinker is an ideal example of this

I believe it’s a platitude of “fair centrism”, not for its concrete weight but it’s symbolism in addressing “both sides”. Veracity and sincerity come to question, when I see this.

If you think that's what the "far left" are advocating for, your Overton window is so far right that you can't even see the left.

From personal experience, most leftists seem to despise the concept of "fair centrism" as far as centrists themselves see it as being somehow balanced, or fair (they are neither)

People like to look equidistant, so they will blame all extremes the same out of reflex.

That everyone who voted for Trump is a white supremacist. I've seen that attitude quite a bit on this site in the days after the election, and I've seen journalists call minorities white supremacists because they didn't vote for Biden. Some people just refuse to believe that he's anything but a wannabe Hitler, and use that as an excuse to say that they have no reason to try and come together as a country.

Intention matters less than material consequences.

Consider the fact that this last year was the worst for hate crimes for at least a decade.

If a whole group of people is propping up a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles, what else could you call them?

>a leader who literally and almost exclusively enacts white supremacist policies, and uses white supremacist rhetoric/dogwhistles

This is where the rift is. This is not true. Yes, some could take that sort of interpretation of what he's saying, and that sort of interpretation being taken by lots of white supremacists regardless of intention, does mean something. But it doesn't mean much, at least, I don't see why we'd expect that to be any significant effect. Just to bring an example, at least, ime the most common "but he said.." claim. The "fine people on both sides" quote. Many misunderstand what he was actually saying there and actually what happened - the event started with a wide range of people on the right, a general conservative gathering seeming thing. It was organized by white supremacists, which lots attending did not realize until some time passed and they started getting uncomfortable and leaving, by the time people were chanting slurs and all, it went full on neo-nazi rally. Trump clearly did denounce that, and what happened that night, and was speaking to the normal people who had attended in the beginning and left later.

The people in attendance have the personal responsibility to associate themselves and their actions with movements that reflect their beliefs. "Boo hoo, I didn't know the KKK was racist when I joined" is not a defense that folks will treat with any sympathy. Even if it wasn't their intention, they still messed up, and that onus remains on their head.

Either way you look at it, those "fine people" are not fine -- they propped up white supremacists, culminating in the brazen murder of an innocent, non-violent counter-protestor and the random assault of numerous others. Even if they didn't know, their actions contributed to that, and they are to blame as are the outspoken racists. What you are saying is, "those people had the privilege to join that march and support those sentiments because they are not threatened by what the march explicitly represents." This is an inherently racist mode of interacting with the world, because it opens avenues for racist violence and oppression, and emboldens more outspoken racists to commit atrocities.

Again, intention matters little when lives are at stake. Your argument enables the banality of evil to persist.

The #1 delusion is reporting case numbers as a cause for concern instead of deaths and hospitalizations. The others are the inconsistent science behind government orders, like closing restaurants after 10PM, allowing patrons to go maskless when sitting at a table but not when standing, etc. The last would be lying by omission. Florida had 50% deaths per capita vs. NY but NY is lauded as a shining example of how to handle a pandemic.

What a bad take. Disregard for covid precautions is the reason we have an outsized outbreak in the US. The outbreak in SD, despite the state’s low population density, will spread to other states.

The outbreak in the US is not particularly "outsized" compared to other developed countries: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&are...

I'd still say ours is outsized, because the US outbreak is essentially the same outbreak we had months ago. Those other countries are on their second or third outbreaks.

Their outbreaks reach higher peaks than ours, but only for a month or so, and then come down to a much lower level than ours, making our one outbreak worse than any of their outbreaks.

Look at Australia and New Zealand. Both free and open societies with high per capita GDP. They both have achieved zero community transmission through stringent travel restrictions and a nationwide strategy. It’s disgraceful that we can’t do the same or better in the US.

In both NZ and Australia it took real leadership by government, and a population overwhelmingly willing to listen to them and to follow the science.

(In Australia's case it has been leadership by state government over the complete opposite by their federal government)

In the US we have real anti-leadership. Our leaders repeatedly cast doubt on science and common sense in order to reduce their own culpability. They spread the myth that there is ‘nothing we can do’ about COVID until we have a vaccine when other countries have proven this to be false.

I think we should look at the case rate for measuring outbreaks, instead of the death rate. I wouldn't say "outsized", but the US' incidence rate is above most developed nations'.

Also, I didn't know that Austria and Switzerland were having such a problem.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&are...

This is not meant to be a rebuttal to your comment, but a discussion.

Consider the case of South Korea and Japan.

1. Dense populations.

2. Very little Covid19.

3. Relatively low lock-down related economic impact.

4. Nearly universal mask wear.

Honest question: what else do we need to know?

I strongly suspect that if the United States, or any other country, had nearly universal mask wearing, we'd have a strong economy AND pretty low infection rates.

I'd love for somebody 'in the know' to modify/correct any of my assertions.

Masks are the thing you do if you cannot socially distance. We have good evidence for social distancing, we don't yet (for a variety of reasons) have good evidence for mask wearing.

You point to South Korea, and then claim it's the masks. But there's a bunch of other stuff they're also doing (because of their experience with coronaviruses): earlier lockdown, harder lockdown, much better test trace and isolate programmes, more social adherence to prevention measures such as hand washing and distancing and mask wearing, people with symptoms choosing to self-isolate, travel restrictions, etc.

You need all of it at the same time, but especially distancing.

Thanks for this, I appreciate it. I'm aware of some of the details you mentioned.

> harder lockdown

So I did some more digging, and found this:

https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/south-korea-faces-another-po...

This broadly supports what you're saying. Their success has been due to many rigorous and (near?) universally adopted protocols, not just mask wearing.

Yeah, and they take all the camera data from CCTV and all the mobile phone data, as well as the contact tracing data (with QR codes to a central system) and use that for contact tracing.

They are trading off liberty for security, and it seems to be working out well for them.

I can only imagine how crazy the US would have gone if the government had tried to do any of this.

In deaths, somewhat true. But in cases, the US in the upper-eschelon!

Why are cases important? Assuming PCR, can get whatever result you want with the cycle threshold (discussion begins around minute 3:50):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE

Want more positive cases? Use a higher threshold. Want to scare the population into compliance? Use a higher threshold. Want to demonstrate that person X or policy Y was effective against stopping spread? Use a lower threshold.

This is pure FUD. Why spread misinformation?

PZ Myers, a prof at Morris, MN, has expressed concern about exactly that in his blog.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/11/15/living-ne...

A few eccentrics? Like someone who will, say, deliberately drive to an area without adequate legal orders in place in the middle of a sharp uptick in cases during a pandemic, just to "feel normal?"

"This feels like it's just to shame everyone based on very few eccentrics."

I must have missed that paragraph. Where in the article was that?

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