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Comment by rgrieselhuber | Hacker News Reader

“Zombie” - dehumanization is always a critical step in the process.

We're talking about a highly contagious disease. I've lost my entire sense of smell (I used to be a quite good amateur chef before that, cooking for friends all the time, now that's gone) and I'm exhausted instantly when I do anything physical now, struggling with tasks that I used to do easily before.

I'm not going to have any sympathy to people who intentionally and knowingly bring that upon others.

So stay out of crowded areas. Rearranging an entire society with these sorts of measures is lunacy.

It sounds like you're arguing for the right to knowingly infect others with contagious disease.

Sometimes things happen that cause society to need to be rearranged. In the case of COVID it really didn't require that much rearrangement - prefer outdoor activities, wear masks, stick HEPA filters in enclosed spaces, keep windows open. Contact tracing apps, maybe. We had those in Taiwan in a way that protected privacy.

Predictably, people with reactionary tendencies, well, reacted, to which I say good luck in your next hurricane I guess? "Bah to this flooded city, I'm not about to let a half meter of water change how I live my life!"

It sounds like you’re trying to make it seem like I said something I didn’t.

Why should society give preference to people unwilling to acknowledge the reality of a pandemic? Seems the obvious solution is to allow access to the commons to those willing to take steps to protect eachother, and block access to malcontents. I'm really confused why this was suddenly controversial during COVID - we had ridiculous rules about commons access before such as you must wear a certain kind of clothing, but mask or vaccine requirements is somehow different? I don't get it but, whatever.

Quarantine and harsher equivalents have been a thing for centuries. They're temporary measures.

And guess what... they're over. Because they were temporary healthcare measures and reasonable people understood that.

They are over because people eventually decided they were done with them.

> They are over because people eventually decided they were done with them.

People didn't "eventually decide" anything.

People accepted that Covid was a pandemic of a new virus and some temporary measures would have to be put in place to avoid a potential repeat of the Black Plague. Reasonable thing to do with a completely new human virus.

So governments put those measures in place <<temporarily>>.

Just like when a storm is coming and you close all the windows, all the doors, make sure that everything important is inside, etc.

Again, reasonable people always knew that strict measures were temporary.

Unreasonable people just assumed we'd be boarded up with wooden planks like in China, for the rest of our lives.

Yup, when I saw those videos of cops chokeslamming people, my first thought was "these guys are totally reasonable!"

My favourite were videos of horse police in Hague/Netherlands wading through people like 17th century cavalry. Looked reasonable enough.

How is it rearranging? MMR had a vaccine mandate for years, I've experienced quarantine for pertussis as a child, etc.

This isn't new or rearranging whatsoever. The only new thing is people suddenly refusing to adhere to reasonable measures to protect each other.

I'm not allowed to go through downtown spreading teargas or anthrax, why should you be allowed to do the same with a different dangerous aerosol?

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