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Comment by juve1996 | Hacker News Reader

juve1996

The media/bad actors online/scam artists aren't concerned about being ethical with their megaphone on full blast instilling fear and panic amongst Americans.

The fact is if I have the choice between being unethical and saving my parents from a life filled with panic and fear, I know what I'm choosing.

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Those media entities were calling people out in the West as wanting to kill their grandmothers when some of those people in the West weren't following very, very strict Covid restrictions, while nowadays the same media calls people in China as heroes and freedom fighters when those people in China are doing the same thing that the anti-Covid restrictions people in the West were doing about two years ago. No-one in here cheers for blocking the likes of the BBC and the NYTimes.

First, I think it's a little bit different to compare these two. One is 3 years after COVID, with vaccines, some level of herd immunity, and better treatment options. The other was immediate when little was understood. China's position is extreme, the west never reached that level of lockdown.

But in any case, I agree. A news diet is important. My parents watch CNN, and I can tell it has negative effects. I tell them to not watch the local news every night and don't put on CNN. This isn't a political thing.

But it must be said - there are much stronger calls to violence on one side, than the other, at this point in time.

I doubt there's consensus on which "side" has stronger calls for violence. But it's not needed. We can just agree that calls to violence are virtually always wrong and deal with them uniformly without respect to ideology.

Even if true, your first part is irrelevant to the question.

As for the second part, there's a reason why we don't take on these responsibilities ourselves, for competent adults. If you _truly_ believe your parents are mentally incompetent, the right thing to do is to present this before a court, with your parents present and allowed to respond. That's how civil society works.

That's too binary for the real world. Somewhere between padded rooms and someone being left to engage in destructive behavior by themselvesbis "intervention", which is a common-enough concept exclusively applied to competent adults.

In this case, we're talking about secret sabotage of someone else's Internet access. This falls outside of the common concept of intervention. In general, if you have to act secretly, you're almost certainly in the wrong.

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