Hacker News Reader

Comment by weljlkjlkerg | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to do flamewar on HN—we're trying to avoid having this place burn to a crisp, and we need everyone's help with that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

By the way, it isn't in your own interest to do this either. By posting this way, all you do is discredit your own view and reinforce the other side. You give people who might be open to your view a fresh reason to reject it—after all, if fuming and fulminating is the best that you can come up with, your case must be terribly weak. This is a poor trade for you to make in exchange for a moment of internet venting.

Not only that, but if your view happens to actually be correct, then what you're doing has the side effect of discrediting the truth, which is not in any of our interests. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Do you feel this strongly about driver’s licenses?

Wait till they hear about actual passports!

Well there is an interesting history to passports. This article does a decent job of outlining how they morphed from a tool to help fight the Spanish Flu to what we see today. https://apposition.substack.com/p/papers-please

Also there is quite a bit of economic work that showcases the positive impact of removing such stringent barriers to the free movement of people.

Of course, restricting people's movement across imaginary borders is very silly indeed. The point I was making is, I see plenty of frothing about vaccine passports, but not one single one of those people having conniptions about them is able to articulate what they would enable a government to do that they can't do already with your normal passport, driving license, tax ID etc.

The difference is that passports are only required for fairly rare activities (international travel, certain kinds of government interactions), whereas COVID passports are required for a lot of every-day things.

A driving license is a license is a certification that you've proven yourself capable to meet the minimum requirements to operate a potentially dangerous device, and more akin to doctor's license, lawyer license, etc. I don't think it's really the same thing.

My concern isn't really with "government can do $evil_stuff", but more in the general restriction of things.

This doesn't address the rather hysterical slippery slope argument that was being espoused. That's the one that I've never has a sane answer to - anything the government might want to do in the future with a vaccine passport, they can already do now with the plethora of unique identifying information they have on you.

HN should let brand new accounts comment once a week for the first 6 months.

The current system is fine for controlling new accounts that just show up to spew invective. They're quickly downvoted and/or flagged, even banned when they go too far. Multiple times I have seen article authors or project creators register a new HN account to specifically comment about work of theirs that has reached the front page of HN. They may write a dozen posts on their first day here, all of them useful.

Why are we attacking the person instead of the argument? We should be discussing the points, not trying to start a flame war. I'm really not sure how vaccination documentation to eat in a restaurant is equivalent to jailing people for their ethnicity, sexuality, or ideology. Can we take a step back and discuss your thought process? You have come to a much different conclusion than I and I would like to understand how. While doing so, can we kindly assume the other person is not trying to be evil?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com