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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

> Covid as bad as it is will be an issue of the near future, civil rights gains or losses will have an impact in decades to come.

There is a lot of truth in this.

In any war there is a level of acceptable losses. For most of the spring, the modern culture wars were on hold and there were no hills worth taking. Now there is something going on that has the potential for long term consequences, so the level of acceptable losses has gone up.

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That’s also a case for reopening - or better never closing the economy - an abrupt stop and socializing losses will leave scars for decades.

Maybe people are just sick of being told they have to put the economy above all else. Can't have single payer healthcare because economy, can't have more days off because economy, can't have a higher minimum wage because economy, etc.

Ask me to take a risk because it is good for the economy and I'll tell you to fuck off. Ask me to take a risk to help reform violent police forces that oppress minorities and I'm more willing to do it.

Like quite a lot of lockdown supporters you appear to believe that there's this optional bit of frippery called the economy which can be switched off like a light switch, without consequence.

Let me explain some of the consequences.

In the UK people have been pulling out their own teeth with pliars because the dentists weren't allowed to be open, not even for emergency surgery. It was "too dangerous" for dentists to be close to their patients.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-52321910

https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/20/mum-tried-pull-tooth-when-cou...

In India, all the factories and shops were closed. But because it's India the government wasn't able to replace people's incomes overnight. Those people started to starve so they tried to go back to their home villages, in the hopes of getting some food from the land. But because of the lockdown they couldn't get transport either, so they started to walk, in some cases they tried to walk hundreds of miles. And some of them died because of it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52086274

In the UK there's now a backlog of 2.4 million cancer tests or treatments. There's no obvious way to catch up and some people will die because of it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8374697/2-4-million...

The economy is defined, literally, as every service or product people sell each other. But sure, it's also just a minor thing that doesn't matter.

There was reporting that if we have properly masked ourselves from the very beginning we could have avoided the shutdowns.

Even places that stayed mostly open got huge hits to their economy due to caution from people. For the economy to not take a hit you would need to force people into Applebee's even if they live with grandma, etc.

"So the level of acceptable losses has gone up." Yeah, right. But no one wants their own grandma to die though, for the cause.

All these meetings are meaningless, because they do not address several problems:

1. There is a serious neglect of educational system in black neighborhoods. There is no discipline in the schools in these areas. There is a lot of push from ultra-left to keep the things as they are "because this is black culture"; lots of ultra-left derive political capital off of misery of minorities - if there was no misery, there would have been nothing to fight against, to become somehow important.

2) Most of black people are killed by the black people in their neighborhoods. The numbers are of different maginitude when compared to police brutality. If the protesters were really concerned about well-being of black minority, they should have argued for better policing, security cameras, better schools, better foodstores in these areas. ASk any protester if they would part with their monety for that cause, raise taxes for exmpale, NO way, They would not.

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