61–70 of 86 posts
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Do you think the people who had the power shut down on their party house feel like they have won?
100% yes. Like you would not believe.
> Haha! They shut us down! We sure showed them!
Wouldn't they rather being able to continue partying with the power on?
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Joke aside, I’m serious. How is throwing big parties in the middle of a pandemic a’freedom’ issue?? The house was warned many times and now they’re facing a reasonable repercussion.
Because your right to stay free from Covid, requires people to behave in a certain way (masks, social distancing) which is at odds with the right to self determination. Sure, it's stupid, but people should be allowed to make stupid decisions for themselves. Not saying I agree but I definitely see the freedom issue.
Maybe I don’t understand what self-determination means, but wearing a mask and keeping 6 ft of distance from another person, does not prevent one from participating in government.
I am waiting for people to advocate their free speech rights are being violated for not being allowed to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
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Do you think the people who had the power shut down on their party house feel like they have won?
To the extent that the organizers received both publicity and validation that they were outlaws, yes. It is also society’s loss to see the state and her leaders lowering themselves to such spiteful tactics. If it’s against the law, arrest them. Denying them access to civilization is just the sort of retributive justice that makes so much of US law and order problematic. What next? Ban them from buying food? Force the…
This is about electricity and the law and COVID-19.
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The leading countries are Australia, NZ, South Korea etc: https://covid19.healthdata.org The estimate is that the US will be at 300,000 deaths by end of year. Whilst NZ will be at 22. US is 65x more populous so if they adopted similar policies would have been at 1430 deaths. And it could even be a million deaths by the time a vaccine is readily available. And people like to bring up the island nonsense but fact is th…
Domestic policies probably don't really do that much aside from maybe closing public services like schools. It has to do with how people behave, as we see in the article here, and NZ gets much less international traffic than the US and the island take has some merit. Iceland had 10 cases, Madagaskar around 150. You could argue that South Korea is an island too since there probably is little exchange on land routes. A…
US has always been completely free to implement similar policies.
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Germany has 9000 fatalities with 81 million people. If we extrapolate the US should have maybe 40000. And Germany has basically open borders with 10 countries directly and with about 30 through Schengen. And a much higher population density.
I think that is much better comparison than New Zealand. Though there is one massive difference Germans hate having freedom and are not willing to die for it from Covid. On a more serious note, this looks like a symptom of some fundamental crack in a fabric of US/UK etc societies where the baseline trust is almost non-existant (towards government, science, institutions).
And the behaviour of people in societies are determined by (a) leadership and (b) policies of the various levels of government. That is where the US clearly has failed.
A simple fine or some other existing punishment would have sufficed. The legal system has had the tools to deal with rule breakers for centuries already. Cutting off water and electricity for order violations sets a very bad precedent, and is highly irresponsible. I'm shocked that it's even legal to do so.
Direct action against a property makes it much harder for them to continue.
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I think you underestimate American willingness to tell authority figures to go fuck themselves. I don't have a better way of phrasing that. This is, perhaps, both the best and worst part of our culture. On the one hand, it gives you rebels that challenge the status quo. That don't take "no" or "that's impossible" for an answer. On the other hand, it gives you a population that would slice off their own noses if the g…
> best and worst part of our culture I admire your ability to see the silver lining. I see it as selfishness to the point of toxicity. I think the ship has sailed on asking people to wear masks. These people--whether they have a borderline ODD tendency to "question authority" and "stick it to the man" for the sake of "personal freedom" (read: selfish masquerading as principled), or if they just can't care about how t…
This thing looks awfully like a pissing match, and it's not just with the one homeowner in Hollywood -- it's with every person that feels the same way.
I would lay good money the cardinality of that set is not a small number.
Doesn't matter whether or not it is a pissing match. It looks like one.
Were I running the state, I'd rather spend my time and energy on doing things that would actually Get People To Wear Masks, as opposed to another round of Pissing Match: San Andreas.
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I think you may have misunderstood. The tools of increasing fines and criminal charges (resulting in jail time or not) have existed for decades already, and are proven in the field to be effective. This is nothing new. There's also nothing stopping the courts from deferring a jail term until the pandemic has passed.
I am going to refer you to this fine comment and officially drop discussing this with you further: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24221493
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Yeah, you tell yourself that.
If someone has the power to do an end-run around the criminal justice system, they'll certainly have the power to get around a municipal utilities shutoff order. In the worst case scenario, they could just order a few trucks of bottled water alongside the kegs, and set up a portable generator. Shouldn't cost more than 20 grand or so. And so what has this new enforcement tool actually done against the belligerent hype…
They are trying to solve the wrong problem.