Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I agree with you. People should be more responsible.

But if your strategy is "people should have less sex for a while" then your strategy will fail -- just as our "everyone stay home for two weeks" didn't work for Covid. Even if most people will follow the guidelines, enough people won't and your strategy will fail.

So, yes, it is a government failure that we didn't have vaccines on hand for virus we stopped vaccinating for a long time ago. These are things we can control. We give the CDC a lot of money to help prevent these things.

By the way -- you can't get a test if you're not a man that has sex with men -- and that's very likely skewing the results. On Twitter many straight people report having blisters and symptoms but are denied tests because they don't fit the profile.

View on HN

Very bizarre to me the way that avoiding covid was moralized and yet the same public health professionals seem more than a little skittish to do so around this. Particularly when the behavior is easier to avoid than breathing the same air as other people.

I'd also like to add that having group sex in public places is not the only way to have sex. Your comment seems to conflate this with all sexual activity.

Yeah... I was mostly in favor of Covid restrictions but it's bizarre to say that "no doing [huge list of normal things everyone does]" is fine and if you don't play along you're a plague rat, but balk at "maybe avoid having tons of anonymous sex with strangers for a little while" because that's just unreasonable.

Reasonable or not, resistance to that suggestion is a reality. We have to play the hand we're dealt.

There is a long and dark history to moralizing and even legislating how and when consenting adults can have sex with each other.

So maybe it's a bit like discussing eugenics. It wasn't a particularly difficult topic when people like Plato were abstractly philosophizing about ideal societies, but it is a charged topic today because we have seen where that road leads in practice.

It's also easier to ask people to make shared sacrifices which everybody should bear equally.

We shouldn't have moralized the response to Covid either.

Trying to shame people into getting vaccinated blew up in our faces -- we now have an entrenched group of people that seem to be opposed to all vaccines, not just those for Covid-19.

People will have sex in ways you and I don't approve of. If your plan is to get them to stop -- it won't work. Just as telling people not to visit their family during Covid didn't work.

A better plan is to get people vaccinated, make testing fast and easy, and to inform people about risk profiles.

If you're deliberately engaging in risky behavior, you don't also get to blame the government for the consequences. The government is not there to facilitate every possible impulse people have at all times.

Note how puritanical feelings about sex and sexual minorities come into play here.

> A grandma dies because her family ignores rules around not gathering during Covid-19 -- tragic.

> A young man dies because he has sex with too many partners -- well, he should have known about the risks.

Insinuations of homophobia are not helping your case. We're talking about having anonymous group sex vs. breathing air. I would feel the same way and see the same glaring distinction if we were talking about a heterosexual orgy.

I'm not sure how that is related to my comment unless you are suggesting that I also hold those beliefs.

I mean... "fuck around and find out" or similar was a pretty damn common response when people who chose to publicly ignore common-sense precautions died of Covid.

It actually seems to be the opposite, from what I've seen. There's a Reddit sub with half a million subscribers, /r/HermanCainAward/, created to make fun of people who were cavalier about Covid and ended up dying from it. There's no sub for people who had tons of unprotected sex and got AIDS or monkeypox, and I'm pretty sure one would get banned immediately if it was created.

Yeah, and that sucks. Those idiots on Reddit should stop.

That’s my point - it’s not effective there or here, for Covid or Monkeypox.

I doubt the people shaming people with illness even think doing so will help change behavior. They probably just enjoy dunking on people they think are beneath them.

Well shit, he shouldn't have sex as much maybe? It's a very avoidable behavior.

I in general do not understand why these dudes do these insane sexual things. I always knew there were people out there who made sex a big part of their lifestyle, but group sex with double digit partners in the last month?

Holy shit not only is that incredibly bizarre to most people, but it's unreasonable to suggest it can't be avoided. Is there just no monogamy in the gay male community?

> Is there just no monogamy in the gay male community?

Of course there is. There are also, for example, gay men who obstain from sex altogether for religious reasons. These group just doesn't get as much attention.

But the distributions are a bit different and the tail of the distribution is longer. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3334840/

    Number of partners, last year [median, range]:
    * Heterosexual men: 1 (0–99)
    * Heterosexual women: 1 (0–7)
    * MSM (Urban Men’s Health Study): 4 (0–500)
    * MSM (Seattle MSM RDD): 2 (0–300)
    
    Number of partners, lifetime [median, range]:
    * Heterosexual men: 8 (1–99)
    * Heterosexual women: 6 (1–99)
    * MSM (Urban Men’s Health Study): 45 (0–9005)

There seems to be a mindset among a large number of people that if a person's behaviors fall into certain socially "protected" categories, that they should be able to do whatever they want, with no consequences, or if there are consequences, they should be compensated for by the rest of society.

According to data from Okcupid, gay and straight people have about the same median number of partners. It's a small fraction of the gay community that is having just a ridiculous amount of sex.

There may be a sampling bias from okcupid, for both demographics, since iirc okcupid is more about dating than it is hookups.

Come on there is a pretty clear difference between getting sick because you just existed along side other people and breathed the same air vs repeatedly inserting your penis inside multiple other people in a single night knowing the risks. There are tons of happy monogamous homosexual couples who are not at risk. If you cant see that you are very much willfully blind. Puritanical feelings have nothing to do with it. No none deserves to die from any virus but the assumption of risk implied is very different. It doesn't make any death less tragic than another though.

Yea, with COVID, we found out the hard way that moralization and shame does not work on people without morals or the ability to feel shame for their actions--a significant enough portion of the population. It's why unenforced, voluntary restrictions were doomed to fail. Sadly, I don't think most countries learned this lesson, and when the next COVID comes around, we're going to make the same mistakes and act surprised that they cause the same results.

Oh we learned the lesson. The lesson is that countries like China that implement draconian pandemic restrictions on and off for years are far too unstable and unpredictable to live in and do business in.

> we found out the hard way that moralization and shame does not work on people without morals

In guilt oriented cultures, people have a moral conscience, which is a counter-balance to social shaming. Such people don't rely upon others to tell them how to live a moral existence.

In shame oriented cultures, people are more concerned about what other people think of them, and can more easily be coerced to 'order themselves harmoniously' (Confucius).

> we now have an entrenched group of people that seem to be opposed to all vaccines, not just those for Covid-19

This group existed in the US long before COVID. I'm curious to see evidence that the messaging around COVID vaccines increased its size.

Not sure about the US but outside the US it has vastly increased its size. Most of the people I know in my local community are unvaccinated, and none of them ever expressed any opinions about vaccines before COVID. Many are tech firm employees or former tech firm employees.

The so-called "anti vax" community was supposedly a tiny minority. In the country where I live, the majority of the population is not boosted despite the government advising everyone to get a booster. Most people now recognize that government health advice about vaccines is wrong and to be ignored. That wasn't the case even just one year ago.

IMO it's the advice about THIS vaccine, not the other long-established vaccines that are normally given in childhood.

People are nervous about new vaccines initially. There's some history to justify it, for those who remember the Swine Flu in the 1970s. They want to wait and see if they are safe. That doesn't mean they are opposed to all vaccines, or even that they are being completely rational on the basis of statistics. This is normal human fear of new things.

Should be fairly easy to tell, if more parents start balking at the "normal" vaccines their young children should be getting. Pre-COVID, the hardcore antivax group was tiny, so any growth should be easy to spot.

I actually agree with you, I think HIV proved that people very much allow their sexual needs to control them even when theirs and others lives are at risk. It was not so much a strategy as cry out to the universe for people to have some common sense and respect for the safety of themselves and others. It would be such a simple win if people just kept their pants on or at the very least limited themselves to one sexual partner at a time for a little while. Its Darwinism screaming at us in the face. This will likely be a situation where the government is forced to step in and save people from themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com