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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Here's the problem. Opponents won't frame it as "comfort" but rather as "death".

People die because we have liberty. If we take some of that liberty away (but not all of it), less people would die. Less people dying is a good thing, right?

- Take away some or all gun liberty. Less people will die in mass shootings, suicides, etc.

- Take away some or all speech liberty. Less people will die by suicide (esp. LGBTQ youth targeted by hate speech)

- Take away some or all liberty to purchase choking hazards such as Kinder Eggs and less children will die.

Basically, for every cause of death or public health issue, you can almost always limit liberty (in the form of laws, regulations, etc.) to mitigate the issue.

Until we as a people decide liberty is worth a few deaths, it'll be a (slow, because democracy is inefficient) race to the bottom.

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We saw a shift in public perception of this trade-off post-9/11. Take airport security, for instance. It is a disgustingly-invasive policy which is security theater more than anything else, and we have sacrificed significant freedom to maintain this charade. Same with things like the "patriot" act. Every time I hear people demanding that politicians "do something", I am bothered by the sacrifice of freedom; people turn to the government for answers.

The entire history of mankind has decided that liberty is worth quite a lot of lives. I feel that the amount of blood spilled to liberate a country highly correlates with how important freedom is considered to be.

I've spent some time getting to know eastern spirituality. I picked non-dualistic tantra as my poison. After that it was easy to see how people can seem so aloof after learning of it (while still being compassionate).

The scripture tackles this head-on, more or less attributing it to the chaos of the universe, and that there is no notion of good and bad.

Eventually it goes on to share some examples, but they all follow the same pattern: if someone committed murder out of passion—and you were ready to judge them for it or offer them the death penalty—could you absolutely, unequivocally, certainly say—without any doubt–that you would not do the exact same thing in their shoes? In their exact circumstances, their state of mind? With heir psychosis or their grief or their desperation?

If you were to physically embody that other person and their consciousness, would you know better than they did?

The answer is always no.

In that same vein, you have your deeply metaphysical counter-argument to the point you're making.

Do you support the death penalty? Well, what if you committed the same crime and got put on death row?

Do you support censorship and authoritarianism? Well, what if the opposition gets into power and uses that against you?

There's no notion of it being wrong or right; it just challenges how happy you are to accept it as a fact of life and not just a temporary advantage in your favour.

It seems like the whole argument boils down to "people don't have free will; you would have been a murderer too had you been born with the same parents under the same circumstances, etc."

>Until we as a people decide liberty is worth a few deaths, it'll be a (slow, because democracy is inefficient) race to the bottom.

We have chosen. This is why cars, sugar, beer and numerous other liberties are legal.

Free choice is woven into the fabric of America. With freedom of choice the collateral death will always be present.

I disagree it is a race to the bottom as we have made life much more livable than in 1787.

> We have chosen.

For now. But remember the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

There are probably quite a few Americans on HN that would like to see cars severely limited or otherwise much more difficult to obtain in favor of trains and public transport. Articles come up regularly about banning cars in cities.

Sugar taxes and sugar drink bans are regularly proposed in California.

Beer... yeah, I concede that will probably never be illegal again, though I could see tobacco becoming illegal some day seeing as the legal purchase age was just raised to 21.

>I disagree it is a race to the bottom as we have made life much more livable than in 1787.

Then why the constant attempts to invalidate the 2nd Amendment when gun death is one of the lowest causes of death?

How does that invalidate my comment? We should never face challenge?

On some level I agree with you but you omit the fact that liberty must be limited. What we're arguing about is how much it should be limited.

>Until we as a people decide liberty is worth a few deaths, it'll be a (slow, because democracy is inefficient) race to the bottom.

The implied problem here is "we as a people" deciding that our liberty is worth other people's deaths. Practically by definition, marginalized and minority groups (more likely to suffer the negative consequences of such liberties) would suffer for the sake of the majority's liberty to oppress them.

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