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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

"The right-wing counter factual you’re spreading is an attempt to distract from the damage caused by certain bad calls made early on to prevent the normal public health response for political reasons."

And that statement is emblematic of the problem. I'm immediately lumped into "right wing" by people like you because I challenged the narrative you believe. I'm not a right winger, and that "counter-factual" isn't right wing either. It's real.

If closing restaurants, both indoor and outdoor, is such a great strategy, then we should expect to see less infections in places that close restaurants vs those that leave them open. That is not the case in the United States. Feel free to compare Florida to California in the cases/deaths per capita metrics.

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Whether or not you self-identify as right wing you’re simply parroting what has been prevalent in right wing media for the last year. We have a lot of data showing how the disease spreads and that wearing masks significantly slows it, which makes unmasked activities like eating far riskier. If people had complied with milder measures last year it’d be different but once safety was politicized spread increased to the point where we are needing strict measures like what the countries I mentioned did until vaccinations rates are high.

Again, you are putting thoughts and words in my mouth. When did I say masks were bad? I was an early advocate for masks in March, when Fauci was still lying to the public with a well-intentioned strategy of preventing a run on N95 masks.

Again, the puritanical "if people had complied" bullshit. Just like abstinence only sex education, you create a policy that is against human nature to adhere to, and then blame the citizens when the horrible, useless policy that will never work fails.

I wear a mask, I socially distance, etc. But you assumed I don't believe any of that because my opinion on one dimension. I'm not "parroting" anything. But because you are in a political tribe, I must be in the other one.

If you read my comment more carefully, the words I was objecting to was a specific claim you made:

“The virus didn’t magically halt economic activity. Governments did, and we need to keep that in mind, because depending on the state, the government response was often far too harsh and not backed by science.”

This is like saying you were hurt by the airbag, not the crash. You could say that specific government reactions made things worse, or the failure to provide economic assistance forced people into risky situations but the root cause was the entire world learning that it was quite risky to be in close proximity to other people.

> And that statement is emblematic of the problem. I'm immediately lumped into "right wing" by people like you because I challenged the narrative you believe. I'm not a right winger, and that "counter-factual" isn't right wing either. It's real.

You may not be right wing, but you're repeating several right-wing memetic shibboleths around COVID and other things, so don't be surprised at the confusion.

Also, you're trying to re-litigate stuff that got settled months ago without actually adding anything new to the discussion, which is tiring.

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