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Comment by salmon30salmon | Hacker News Reader

No relationship. Just bored on a day off. I am passionate about Covid related topics because I am frankly concerned by the rhetoric around Covid. It boggles my mind that this has become so politicized and opposition is equated with homicidal disregard for human life.

There is also so much sensationalism around Covid that it's impossible to actually discuss. Mask compliance for example. I've heard so many times that if only dumbfuck America would mask up we'd be sitting pretty. Except the US has some oh the highest mask compliance of western nations. People talk about anti-lockdown protests as being pawns for the far right and hating science, yet these protests are not unique to the US or the Right.

Essentially our response to a pandemic has devolved into people shouting memes at one another while 30 million unemployed are liking up at food banks. It's fucking crazy

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I think in this case, you're getting back what you put into the conversation. I've never been accused of disregarding human life, and I've had a bunch of conversations here and elsewhere about COVID-19 response.

It feels like you're in what I call a "contrarian headspace" where you believe you've discovered something that's under-reported or under-represented, and you've grabbed firmly onto that belief, riding it into every conversation you can. Here be dragons, especially on HN.

I think, to retain my own sanity, I'm going to bow out of this conversation, but I do suggest you take a good hard look at how your beliefs landed you on the same side as the system crushing Rebekah Jones. What they're doing to her is, regardless of legal technicality, problematic, and if you're not able to see that because of your feelings about COVID coverage, you're in some trouble.

And likewise, you inability to see her as anything but a martyr against an oppressive system is informed by your tightly held belief that the government is for some reason downplaying Covid.

Oh is that not the case? Then don't attribute some armchair psychology to my motives. I in no way think I've "discovered" something underreported. I know full well that millions of people, from credentialed scientists to dumbfuck hillbillies see the same things I rail against.

I've been accused of disregarding human life for my views on Covid response. Which is funny as Covid has touched my family in painful ways.

Humans are complex beings, more so than your coined phrase captures. But I still love you! I hope someday we all can have a calm, reasonable discussion about epidemics. Because this will happen again, so we need to study our response here as much as possible

Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. What you've been doing on this site is over-the-top excessive and it's time to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wow, looks like free speech went here to die!

Police are raiding her house, pointing guns at her kids, continuing to come back with technically illiterate and nonsensical reasons to arrest her, because she's said something that someone in politics did not like. Why is this discussion even about covid? This is not an epidemic discussion, this is a political liberties discussion.

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for and the guidelines ask everyone not to do it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The discussion is about covid because that's the only factor informing people's opinions on the matter. If we didn't know anything about her Covid work - if the only information we had was that some random government ex-employee was arrested for allegedly misusing government credentials - nobody would presume to know what the full story is or what's motivating the prosecution.

Beyond your nonsense about free speech..

This is a discussion about Covid because the accused was motivated by Covid. My argument is that the hysteria we've whipped up over this pandemic has caused people to take crazy risks to further a cause which only exists in our hysteria.

I believe Ms. Jones earnestly believes that she had to do these things to save tens of thousands of lives. If those weren't the stakes in her head, would she have downloaded PII and misused an alert system?

Essentially our rhetoric around Covid is mentally dangerous for many people and can cause them to act beyond reason due to their misinformed notion of risk

This:

> But I still love you!

comes off as _super_ disingenuous.

Essentially our response to [every issue] has devolved into people shouting memes at one another...

That is the unfortunate state of public "debate" in the US today. Questions never get settled, and as a result, very little gets done.

If the state’s data is garbage in the first place then the chance of a good-faith debate happening drops even further. I’m more than a little disturbed by the narrative that it’s OK for the state to lie as long as they are advancing a cause that you agree with. The underlying issue (covid) should not matter.

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