Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I’ve seen a lot of epicly dumb posts surrounding COVID. There’s obviously some people who don’t understand the ideal gas law or gas diffusion, there’s obviously some people who are paranoid schizophrenic to levels that make me look totally sane (I especially love the people who are convinced God will protect them. Evolution in action, I tell you)

One of the interesting questions is to what extent the group has the right to restrict freedoms of the individual for the best interests of the group. This is a slippery slope, and it’s very difficult to figure out how down it you should go. Common sense says that given how much wearing a simple mask reduces transmission, that requiring wearing masks is a reasonable thing. After all, we put up with being required to wear clothing (although I do think that there should not be laws requiring wearing clothing – I actually think this is more restrictive and less reasonable than requiring people to wear masks *where there is a demonstratable large safety advantage to the group*)

Anyway, I’m sure it’s a subject that people will be debating for centuries, and I don’t know what the right utopic answer is – I suspect the answer is different people will want different things. I also suspect it’s one of those things where the winning answer might be to have people inside a virtualized world where they have unlimited freedom even though their “real” body is subject to restrictions for the good of everyone.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2020 at 9:15 pm and is filed under COVID-19. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.