Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America is giving up on the pandemic?

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 1001 posts

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#461

Post by catalogia »

mvid wrote: post #393
manfredo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When one group of people is holding signs that say "stop murdering people" and the other group is holding signs that say "I need a haircut," and you're mad that "the commenters" are not treating them the same, the problem is not with the commenters. This is at best an extremely distorted comparison of the two messages. 40 million people are unemployed. The stakes are much larger than just getting a haircut.

Yet those were the signs being held. There are clear goals for police brutality protests. The anti-quarantine protests had no clear goal, the narrative seemed to be “the government hit their ‘disable economy’ button and we want them to turn it back on” as if relaxing legal restrictions would suddenly make everyone ok with the rampant disease and go spend time rubbing shoulders again. People were self quarantining bef…

> Yet those were the signs being held.

Those are the signs you were shown, or chose to notice.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#462

Post by zepto »

zarathustreal wrote: post #291
HuShifang wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public health is concerned with the health of the public -- which includes health issues induced by stress, poor nutrition, pollution, etc. (Ever notice how African Americans' life expectancy is much lower than that of white Americans? Public health experts have. They study it.) So, in this case, they're calculating that making strides against inequality will be worth the cost of more COVID-19 cases.

That is absolutely not the case. Furthermore there is nothing wrong with inequality, the only way we could all be equal is if we were all the same person. Even then we would exist in different physical space and thereby find different opportunities. Consider how mentally sick a person would have to be to think they have the right or even the ability to weigh the value of someone else's life against the value of someo…

There is sometimes nothing wrong with inequality, and other times a lot wrong with it.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#463

Post by sdenton4 »

manfredo wrote: post #337
statguy wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting 80 from? The link says 1,043 in the past year. Did you mean 80 per month?

1,000+ includes all people killed by police, most of them armed. You need to filter for unarmed killings. Hover over "weapon" and click unarmed. It's 350 from 2015 to the present.

The time I was arrested at a protest, I was charged with carrying a sharpened stick (aka, protest sign). I didn't even have that, though... It was a lie in the report.

The police regularly distort their reporting. There is no centralized collecting of police violence statistics, in large part because they have organized against the collection of those statistics. The 1,000+ number will be far less subject to manipulation.

Here's some additional reporting. The 2014 Tampa Bay Times project to track police violence found 827 people shot in a year. In Florida alone. They spent a huge amount of effort on the reporting because the statistics were sometimes not collected and usually not trustworthy where they were.

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/f...

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#464

Post by scruple »

ImaCake wrote: post #401
scruple wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't even know who Fred Hampton was. Even people who lived through the civil rights movement don't recall his name. My own parents downplay the violence of the 70s in favor of the rhetoric du jour that they're fed from mainstream media, and they lived in DC from 1972 until late in 1980 (and, all things considered, they are leftists, not liberals, which makes it even more astonishing to me). It's quite as…

This is fascinating to me. The more I see about America's protest history, the more it seems like the last 20 years have been abnormally calm and your normal state of affairs is more like the mood in 2020. A quote I liked from your linked article: >You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed ther…

> ...it seems like the last 20 years have been abnormally calm and your normal state of affairs is more like the mood in 2020.

There are periods of calm and periods of dramatic unrest. The history of political activism / protests in America touches the civil rights movement, the worker rights / labor movements, etc..., and goes all the way back to the first taxes the newly formed United States federal government tried to levy against domestic goods (in the form of the Whiskey Rebellion [0]). The American revolution itself was the result of a series of protests that started with the Stamp Act of 1765 [1]. It is a truly fascinating history.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#465

Post by dehrmann »

metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

Political statements like that can really hurt their credibility as public health officials, especially if increased transmission from protests causes them to call for another lockdown. Either say large, outdoor gatherings like this are risky or they aren't (or maybe they're just slightly risky). Don't get into "protesting these things is ok, protesting these isn't."

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#466

Post by dasudasu »

Shivetya wrote: post #252
metrokoi wrote: post #90

Quoted from a letter from 1,000 health professionals on the virus and protests [0] >However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from…

Why are they taking this position. Simple, it cost them nothing to do so all the while letting them claim they understand. This is nothing more than #hashtag politics. A do nothing stance because no risk is taken So yes of course there is risk. However as with anything political no honest discussion is permitted. This is why people calling out the violence and looting are being hushed or intimidated because politicia…

There is much more risk in not taking that stance in the current environment.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#467

Post by braythwayt »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #430
braythwayt wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then, if I am a “professional” software developer, and my employer asks me to put a secret back-door in some code to be shipped to consumers... I should say nothing, because I’m a “professional?” Or what if I’m doing renovations, and someone asks me to make something I know to be unsafe. I point that out, but they insist... Again, do I just do what they ask because, “professional?” I suspect you are conflating “pr…

What you certainly don't do, if you're doing renovations, is sign off on something that you know to be unsafe because the people who built it are fighting systemic racism.

I was responding to the question of “professionalism” being somehow devoid of ethics, and therefore medical professionals should not take ethics into account when making decisions.

I would interpret your remark as suggesting, “Professionalism involves ethics, but there is an interpretation of those ethics that suggests these particular people should have made a different choice in this stuation.”

I could agree or disagree with your conclusion, but I can certainly support the form of your argument as sound: Professionals should have ethics, so let’s talk about what those ethics should be, and how to apply them to this situation.

———

It’s the same conversation as, “Should professional work for a social media business that amplifies and spreads falsehoods, violent rhetoric, &c.”

If someone were to say, “A professional just writes code, the effect of that code on society is not their business,” I think that’s flat-out wrong. Not taking a stand on the matter is taking a stand, but lying to yourself about not taking a stand.

On the other hand, people can and do regularly have discussions about whether there is a “greater good” served by allowing people to communicate and decide for themselves whether George Soros is behind Black Lives Matter, or whether the Coronavirus was actually hatched by Bill Gates in an attempt to use a vaccine to inject people with microchips.

I have opinions about the ethics of that too, but I can appreciate that there are people who are also trying to apply ethics to such decisions, even if they are ethics I disagree with or flat-out abhor.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#468

Post by rayhendricks »

School-Cotton wrote: post #244
Barrin92 wrote: post #4

The concerns are right but public assembly is critical in a democracy, and cannot be put on hold indefinitely. It's probably the most fundamental right in any civil society and with all these takes I have seen on twitter about COVID and the protests, a lot of people seem to seriously unerestimate the value that free assembly has. Covid as bad as it is will be an issue of the near future, civil rights gains or losses…

Public assembly is critical, yes. So is the ability to work, run a business, get married, and engage in social gatherings. Either COVID-19 is serious enough that it merits cancelling a bunch of “critical” features of normal life, or it isn’t.

I agree with this statement. At least here in Seattle the protesters and police are packed closely together and are yelling at oneanother. Very few if any police are wearing masks (I was ~20ft from anyone & wearing a mask but wanted to see things 1st hand).

IMO this will create a level of pandemic similar to NYC unless we really start testing and contact-tracing. It does feel like much of the left is OK with this, whereas everyone was freaking out when the reopen protesters were protesting. This is inconsistent, and unfortunate as I do have somewhat left-leaning views.

Re: America is giving up on the pandemic?

#470

Post by refurb »

catalogia wrote: post #457
refurb wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think things are worse now than in the 1960's, I don't know what to tell you. They were way worse. Multiple politicians assassinated. Major multi-day riots across multiple cities with hundred dead. Then a president being impeached. 2020 doesn't even come close to the 1960's.

Trump and Clinton were both impeached too. Neither were convicted, but Nixon wasn't convicted either (he quit before that could happen.)

Very true, but to your point, it was a given Nixon was leaving. With Clinton and Trump it was more political than a done deal.
Post reply on HN