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Comment by rwcarlsen | Hacker News Reader

The war on freedom.

Please explain. What do you mean by that?

I wish you would not feed the trolls.

I'll try hard to keep the discussion nuanced. Governments are basically institutions that we allow to restrict our freedoms for some benefits - safety, various common-good things, etc. We all have our preference for where we draw this line personally on the liberty/convenience <--> safety spectrum. A lot of people (including myself) feel like these lockdowns, pandemic mitigations, etc. have far crossed the acceptable line in this spectrum. In my opinion, I'm not fighting a virus any more. I'm fighting people trying to steamroll my rights and lifestyle. Others may feel differently - they may feel like for the sake of global/community safety, I should have fewer rights. I don't feel that way. This isn't binary. Nobody is right or wrong - we are all fighting for our line on the spectrum.

Your rights end where mine begin. You don't have the right to infect me. You give up your right not to wear a mask when you go into a grocery store. But no matter how foolish you are, if you get sick, you still get to go to the ER, where you're contributing to the maxing out of capacity. And you can infect those on the street.

In some perfect libertarian society, where I could tell that I got sick from you, I'd settle things by suing the pants off you. But that's not the real world. Your choices affect me, and society's restrictions are how we set that balance.

If you think your right to virus-free air trumps the rights of others, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Funny how similar it sounds to the argument for “restricting carbon emissions”, another thing that people naturally exhale.

But don't you realize it's completely circular? You have the right to have me not have the right to infect you. But don't I also have the right to have you not have the right to have me not have the right to infect you? The point is. How much do we want to limit _individual_ freedom in order to achieve community/global safety. This is not a black/white question with a right/wrong answer. As much as you want it to be a cut-and-dried issue - "you're rights end where mine begin", etc. - it is not. It is trivial to disassemble any argument along those lines. At the end of the day - it's all about freedom vs safety. It's fine if you don't draw your line in the same place. But trying to imply/suggest that your position is somehow objectively more right/true is ridiculous.

You're choosing to die on a hill of not wanting to wear a face covering for a short period of your life.

IMO there are much worse encroachments on rights happening, and this anti-mask thing seems to be symbolic for some people. But to others it appears foolish because temporarily wearing a mask or distancing really isn't the big deal you make it out to be. You're worried that these changes will become permanent, and I promise you they won't be. Everyone wants to go back to having freedom of movement.

These specific changes won't be permanent - I agree. But the precedent they set for the future will be. And, in the mean time - these mitigations have and are having a huge personal impact on me, my wife, and my children - among others. Just because a lot of these things might not be a big deal to you, doesn't mean they're not a big deal to others. And I'm tired of people telling me that these things aren't a "big deal" to me. How the hell can they know how big of a deal they are to me? That's up to me to decide.

You know the irony of refusing to take precautions for concern about the future is it makes the future worse. More people get sick when we are not careful.

If you were in a region with Ebola you would wash hands, wear a mask and more. And for 300k dead Americans, this essentially was Ebola. Right now is a once in a hundred year event where the whole world has to endure this pandemic. These are temporary steps that no one takes lightly to make the future better.

What makes you think I'm refusing to take precautions? I take precautions consistent with how I perceive the risk to myself and others - just like I always have my entire life. Just like you have your entire life. Ebola is a completely different risk/tradeoff profile than covid. Consider how many quality of life years have been lost due to things "saving" us from the pandemic. I'd wager we've had at least a ~10% reduction in quality of life for everyone in the U.S. (that's where I live so I'll use the example). That's 300+ million people for about a year. That's 30 million quality of life years lost. How many people will we have saved? Maybe 500,000? On average they had maybe 3 years left to live each. Also, people dying tended to not have a great quality of life (i.e. they were near the end of their life anyway) - but just to keep the estimate conservative we won't discount/reduce the worth of their final years. So we saved 1.5 million quality of life years. What kind of moronic tradeoff is that?

> people dying tended to not have a great quality of life (i.e. they were near the end of their life anyway)

Who are you to say a grandparent is not enjoying the best years of their life seeing their children raise children, or a great grandparent for that matter? And, children may well enjoy sharing the experience of parenthood with their parents, so the premature loss of one life can hurt many people.

Your whole take is based on a bunch of assumptions that everyone is miserable towards the end of their lives, that children and community feel no loss when elders die, and that just is not true. Life takes on a different meaning as we grow, and no age is of less worth.

My entire take was explicitly _not_ based on discounting the value of older people's years. Also, the loss from death is felt by loved ones regardless and is approximately the same whether someone dies this month, next month or next year. Generally, w.r.t. the pandemic we are very rarely talking about someone that is losing more than a couple years. I explicitly said I was not discounting the value of older people's years - for the sake of conservative argument. You aren't arguing against my point. You just found a way to turn it into an emotional issue. I care about old people. I have 3 grandparents in their mid 80s who I love very much. Although it might be easy to allow yourself to dismiss my argument because you can convince yourself that I just don't care about my fellow man and the aging population - that is simply not the case. I was saying that a reasonable argument could be made for discounting those years, but I didn't for my numbers arg. My point still stands.

> the loss from death is felt by loved ones regardless and is approximately the same whether someone dies this month, next month or next year.

Again, who are you to make such assumptions? You don't know the ongoings of other peoples' lives or how they feel.

In the absence of evidence either way, I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption. Without some level of assumptions, we would be paralyzed and useless - never able to make decisions. Use the data we have - make reasonable assumptions, revise assumptions as new information is available. I can speak from the experience of myself and those I know - which is that death hurts - period. It's also inevitable. Make your peace with it. Don't let your fear of death ruin your life (and the lives of others). Who are you to assume that these mitigations are less bad for society than the alternative? Because you also make assumptions. I'm just saying some people feel and assume differently than you. Just because they disagree with you doesn't mean that they aren't reasonable, well-read, thoughtful, people that have good reason to feel/think differently than you.

We can make do with help from the government during this emergency, and there is no need to threaten shortening people's lives.

What's circular? You're free to not wear a mask on your own property. On somebody else's property you follow the other person's rules. On public property you follow public rules.

There are all kinds of rights that have nothing to do with what people can do on their own property. Read almost every amendment - many have to do with rights we have places outside our own personal property. The entire point of this discussion is about what we are allowed to do in places nobody "owns" - i.e. places the govt owns - because the govt's purpose is to serve the people after all. Your argument is hopelessly broken here. What if the government told you you didn't have the right to leave your property - even to get food for yourself. Too bad for you - you are only free to get food on your own property. You probably wouldn't like that I suspect.

Here's a more nuanced example: in Singapore, you will soon be required by law to carry a device that registers your checkins to all public locations (stores, schools, stations etc) and also uses Bluetooth to register your contacts: https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/

Despite some notional safeguards, this is clearly a massive invasion of privacy. With an active pandemic, you can argue that this is a worthwhile tradeoff, but as the pandemic wanes, at what point does the harm start to outweigh the good?

I wear a P100 respirator everywhere I go in public. According to every government on the planet, I am 100% kosher, but if I am infected, the exit valves on my mask will spread my virus far and wide.

Governments also routinely permit balaclavas, shemaghs, and other completely ineffective face coverings as valid for their poorly-considered statutes.

You worship the State, but your God will not save you. It never has, and it never will.

The CDC explicitly says not to use masks with exit valves [1] for that very reason. Some cities and counties have banned them [2]. American Airlines, and probably others, do not permit them on airplanes.

However, my point isn't that governments are successfully implementing effective mask mandates. They're not. My point is that I don't think people have a right to endanger others in public spaces. I think not wearing a mask is morally wrong. You should show more consideration for your fellow residents and get some proper, tight-fitting masks without valves, even if they're not as comfortable.

And while the "State" is slacking on enforcement, the grocery stores here have been good at tossing out people who aren't masked up. The social pressure has led to a lot of mask use. The 300-person wedding here that led to dozens of infections and several deaths has been named and shamed by the media, which should hopefully deter others. Society is much larger and more powerful than your "State," don't forget that.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2020/05/26...

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