Hacker News Reader

Comment by kanox | Hacker News Reader

The whole "coronavirus is affecting out civil liberties" stance is extremely harmful. The government is not out to get you in a pandemic.

If you want to argue that manufacturing can be open safely fine, and it's also fine to sue the county to force their hand.

But coronavirus restrictions save lives (stuff like mask wearing) and tweeting crap like "FREE AMERICA NOW" is extremely unhelpful. We should be arguing about the exact way in which government intervention can be used to reduce the spread.

View on HN

> The government is not out to get you in a pandemic.

Replace pandemic with war. What's the difference? Governments readily encroach on civil liberties during emergencies. And we know how advocates of the Patriot Act recognized it would be a powerful law, so they said it would be temporary. We all know how that turned out. It doesn't seem like it'll go away now.

I fear we'll play out something similar with lockdown. And what's really somewhat horrifying is that the mere mention of concerns surrounding lockdown is made out to be crazy, dangerous, inhumane, etc.

Terrorism is a permanent low-level threat but pandemics and and floods are acute and have a reasonably well-defined end. The latter justify emergency powers specific to combating the issue at hand.

Imminent invasions also justify emergency powers, but not overseas wars.

My guess is that the pandemic will be completely under control before a year has passed.

It seems we’re teetering around calling for these encroachments on really vague criteria even as far as “if anyone is dying.”

The government may not be out to intentionally "get" anyone, but it's still very capable of harming when it intends to help.

That's what's behind a lot of the consternation over government responses. A lot of lives are at stake, and not just those which might be taken by COVID.

From the moment the government decided to declare a state of emergency, multiple surveillance bills with support from both sides have been pushed. Rand Paul did well to point out the people like Lindsay Graham and Dianne Feinstein haven't wasted a second trying to expand government powers instead of helping Americans. The government is clearly out to get people, there is no question about it.

> We should be arguing about the exact way in which government intervention can be used to reduce the spread.

This personal opinion is not echoed by many people who feel that the government has overreached. They feel that if a person wants total government control of their safety, that person can move to a country like China.

Tesla has moved to a country like China. I wonder when we can expect some "FREE CHINA NOW" tweets from Elon.

I didn't realize the gigafactories in China were shut down.

Of course it was. And is likely to be again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com