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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Some people are incredibly stupid and willing to hurt those around them if that allows them to exercise their whims. The rest of society needs to be protected from them, and that is a key function of government.

Someone close to me had a coworker who doesn’t believe in the COVID-19 virus and feels that his employer’s guidelines were designed to embarrass the president. He came to work with symptoms, and infected dozens of people, a few of which are hospitalized.

It’s branch of stupid human behavior that’s always with us. Google the history of “Typhoid Mary”.

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So then its a question between: A) Tolerate stupid people B) Institute deeply fascist laws that can be taken advantage of and put the entire society in perill.

To me, its pretty clear which is the way to go. I'd rather have the society shame people than put them in undisclosed location for being stupid. Karen's movement is great!

Society has a lot of tolerance for stupid people. In normal times their stupidity isn’t spreading an infectious disease that’s killing thousands of people every day in the US alone (3,764 people died in the US from Covid yesterday)

A good analogy might be the penalties for driving while intoxicated, which is even more likely to kill or seriously injure somebody than going to a public place while infected with SARS-CoV-2.

We as a society have tremendous tolerance for these people (at least in the US), who are less "stupid" and more some combination of "dangerously selfish" and "mentally ill". Many such people still have driver's licenses, and you only really get punished for a DWI when you actually do kill or injure somebody.

So if that is the standard society has, we should apply it to COVID-19 to be consistent. If someone dies of a Covid case that is traceable to your own negligence (e.g. going to work with symptoms and no mask), you should be held liable for manslaughter.

Then there needs to be specificity of the amount of harm thats allowable. The law is a blankslate to make you squirm after 30 years "We told you so in 2021, when the pandemic hit and we moved on". You know the exactly the erosion that happened after 9/11 - patriot act, big brother, surveillance state. Those are all norms now.

It's not some high moral ground of freedom thumping people. This is what our grandfathers fought for.

No, it’s C) protect the general welfare of society.

As demonstrated, folks don’t get that, so we empower the state to compel behavior.

There’s a lot of high minded morality around “freedom” with these matters. The reality is the laws around public health are much less draconian than they once were and predate fascism and its ilk. If you showed up in Philadelphia during the constitutional convention with sailors aboard your ship with smallpox, you’d be quarantined and left to die, and the ship set ablaze.

Which was the least severe thing to do at the time. Given alternative measures of a less extreme measure, and you'd find that we don't set people'd boats on fire that often anymore. There is no need for reversions to barbarism. Authoritarianism always looks attractive in the presence of invasive parasites. This is exactly the type of thinking to be looked out for and rooted out in any Free or Liberty centric society. Eternal vigilance indeed.

So, you didn't look up the history of Typhoid Mary [0]. "Typhoid" Mary Mallon was so called because she could spread typhoid fever despite not suffering its symptoms. She also refused to stop finding employment as a cook, a choice which killed at least three people and probably dozens more. People did not just tolerate her: they died for her right to do as she wished, including her right to work.

While there are indeed obvious ethical issues about the incarceration of people like Mallon, and we should have a much better legal framework which isn't as intrusive to their rights, the fact is that an inability to enforce social distancing for just this one person caused tallyable fatalities.

Like, you don't think that the ice-cream licker should have been tolerated despite obvious stupidity, right?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

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