Hacker News Reader

Comment by sto_hristo | Hacker News Reader

The terrorist attack was an act of murder - controlled, planned, deliberate, malicious, vindictive. The other is a normal natural occurrence that has been happening since cellular life began and every living thing lives with. And just because the consequences of either can be described with numbers, doesn't mean they can be compared.

You can do a better job comparing apples and oranges as they do correlate on the basis of nutrition value.

Modern media is just... pathetic.

View on HN

Refusing to do even the simplest of measures - like requiring masks - turns a disease into murder. Heck, we've used disease as agents of terror and murder. Smallpox blankets, anyone?

I'd also argue that folks have been killing others for centuries, including in terrorist-like attacks, so you could argue that 9/11 was just a natural part of being human.

These things can be compared, even without using numbers.

But more importantly, we are often reminded of the death toll of 9/11, so it is apt to be compare the two. This isn't the "pathetic media". IT is people not wanting to die because others refuse to do basic things to help others.

Even more disturbing is that people outright refuse to take a look at numbers to check what measures actually did.

Just mentioning datasources and asking people to look can attract a lot of downvotes. People just suppose the data might point into a direction they don't accept - nobody looks at the data.

Smallpox blankets are a myth. They were an idea proposed in military correspondence but there is no evidence to support their actual use.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the...

They were indeed used earlier than that (see links), but we don't know if they actually spread smallpox (since the virus was old and the tribes were already experiencing smallpox). Just because we know one instance was false doesn't rule things out. Who knows what we have lost to time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt#Biological_... [2]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/...

Natural part of being human is getting hungry, or having to go to toilet, or sleeping, etc. You don't get punished for any those - it doesn't make sense to do so. Murdering ourselves for this and that reason is not part of the daily routine and one can't just decide to go an murder rampage, because - "meh, it's just that time of the day."

Murders do happen, it's a thing, but that doesn't make them normal.

Your smallpox example it's as sensationalist as the stupid article. Everything around us can be turned into a weapon. One can murder another with a rock. Are rocks deadly now? Do we need to ban fire, because it can be used in incendiary bombs to level down cities?

Compare this pandemic to other pandemics. What about this is so hard to comprehend? Don't compare it to states of war, because that is stupid. I know it's clickbaity and such an irresistible lure for easily influenced people that bite on anything without giving it an ounce of though, but it's so trivial to catch it.

Again - Compare this pandemic to other pandemics.

Other pandemics, like.. H1N1? Or maybe you were thinking about smallpox, polio, measels, and the like? You know, when we would enforce quarantine? Or the 1918 flu outbreak, which was worse because of non-reporting on the American side and also had anti-maskers (though, I think quarantine was actually enforced).

If you are talking about deaths, it is natural to compare it to other high-death abnormalities. War and pandemics are the easiest to compare absolute death numbers, and helpful for pointing out people's inconsistencies - like caring for 3k deaths in a day when it is an act of violence, but not caring if it is disease. Change things for the folks for 9/11, but not for continuing deaths - some of which are preventable. I'll go right ahead and compare.

Smallpox links: [1]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/... [2]https://archive.org/stream/fortpittlettersf00darl#page/n103/...

Yeah, other pandemics. Finally some progress. You even got a good example with the Spanish flu. It was utterly terrifying, considering that it wiped between 1% and 6% of the global population in a sparsely populated world where nobody could easily travel anywhere they wished at any time - vastly different from today's world, which is ideal for an infectious disease.

9/11 was direct act of violence against the US, of course people will take that more personally than something that not only is a whole separate kingdom from the one we're in, but it doesn't even qualify as a living thing. Had it been proved to be used as a weapon and the pandemic - a deliberate attack, people everywhere would take it so personally and dearly that nuclear weapons would be casually flying every day since March.

Therefore, 9/11 and the weaponized germs stuff you linked just doesn't make sense in our context. Go make another thread dedicated to weaponization of stuff, you can even include k-t extinction event as well for color, sky is the limit.

Deliberate murder is common in nature as well, down to cellular level. If you want to classify failing to fight an infection as natural behaviour, I'm not sure why murder wouldn't be as well. This is not a great logic.

My post is about the ridiculousness of comparing pandemic to an act of aggression. I made no comments on the measures being taken. Please, invest an effort into reading and comprehension. Following the logic of the article, i can dismiss the severity of this exact pandemic, because WW2 nets much more casualties than COVID.

Then if you want to classify deliberate murder as something natural, i can come and simply murder you and it will be perfectly OK. And as viruses have killed more people than the sum of all wars and homicides, it will be literally of no relevance to anyone.

I don't know how long you've been living on this planet, but not knowing the difference between being murdered by someone who shot you and dying from a disease speaks of immaturity i can't do nothing about.

The problem is with the response. The way I see it, it’s a moral spectrum. You can trade the diseased blankets, be nonchalant about a spreading disease, or spend some effort reducing infection. The US is taking the middle path and its resulting in 100’s of thousands more deaths than the third path would (as observed from a country that took the third path and has nearly zero infections now, and comparable economic consequences to the US).

No it’s not the murder of Al Qaeda but I feel that it’s negligence (of leadership) that leads to death.

The problem with the response is its own problem. Comparing two incomparable things is the object of my post and no sane logic can deny that.

Compare the negligence that allowed terror to flourish and eventually lead to the global War or terror to happen to the same negligence that allowed WW2 to happen.

Compare the response to COVID to the response to other similar pandemics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com