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Comment by BulgarianIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Every time you increase compliance through force, you increase the incidents of abuse and incorrect use of the force. That's not a fallacious or even surprising revelation, and it's not specific to anything in particular about COVID-19.

It can be detrimental overall when the measures to be enforced are mostly security theater, rather than effective. Unfortunately, my observations are that both after 9/11 and during the COVID-19 crisis, force was on the bottom line mostly used to oppress and abuse, less so to decrease risk of terrorist acts and infection respectively.

In a smarter, less corrupted society, where these measures we're trying to enforce are well thought out, tested and effective, the use of force would still be necessary, despite compliance in general would be better due to effective information campaigns. Alas.

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> Every time you increase compliance through force (...)

Enough with this disingenuous bullshit. Public health officials specified basic public health measures to fight a pandemic, like washing your hands, practice social distancing, and wear a mask. That's it. What do you expect to achieve by putting up these pathetic strawmen? Do you actually expect to gaslight everyone who lived through the pandemic?

Did you miss the horrors of the Chinese lockdowns? The Australian "quarantine centers" practices & abuse? What about people in Greece who were banned from leaving their homes or neighborhood? I'm barely scratching the surface, there was so much stupidity in how we handled the pandemic, worldwide.

You're simply ignorant. Very, very, ignorant, and very arrogant which blinds you from your ignorance. That's a classic toxic combo.

For the record, I'm double vaccinated, wore masks before anyone else did, after most everyone else did, and FFP2/N95 respirators at that, not surgical masks, and I obviously avoid tight crowds and wash my hands.

But your attitude is counter-productive and frankly disgusting. Every issue has two sides. A reasonable person is aware of this and plays the uneasy, but necessary balancing game to avoid extremes. You are NOT a reasonable person. You're a loudmouth who thinks they're on a religious mission to shut the mouths of "gaslighters" who do not sufficiently praise authority, which is blameless and infallible. You're part of the problem.

If anyone is gaslighting, it's you, who dismisses a whole complex range of extremely valid criticisms of civil liberties abuses, dubiously rushed policies, regulatory incompetence and in some cases outright dishonesty by government organizations and politicians as "disingenuous bullshit"... What an absurdly narrow, simplistic and willfully ignorant take on so many complex points.

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