[cryoshon]

what can be said to people like the author?

"i told you so" is too bitter an admonishment for someone who has shown contrition and suffered greatly for their sizeable sins. "sorry for your loss" is too gentle. "why didn't you listen?" will simply devolve into partisan bickering, and nobody will be convinced.

more importantly, what might we say to someone to prevent them from killing other people through their ignorance and intransigence, like the author did? rational discussion of evidence hasn't worked. legal mandates haven't worked. social shaming hasn't worked. mass death hasn't worked.

and more importantly still: how can we hope to build or repair a society when people like the author are so keen to drag us down, at least until they fall victim to the very problem we are trying to protect them from?

we can't simply let them all get infected if they are nearby -- they'll drag us to hell with them, as they already arguably have. at what point do we refuse to entertain their backwardness? at what point do we withdraw from them or exile them and leave them to their fate?

[hprotagonist]

“Go and sin no more” is the traditional dismissal, but it’s too often interpreted poorly.

I am not interested in punishment or wailing and gnashing of teeth, or public wearing of hair shirts or sackcloth and ashes. I want to see positive, healing, restorative acts. We’ll call that a good penance.

[HarryHirsch]

I'm not interested in Truth and Reconciliation committees when this is all over (not before mid-2021), the question is what can be done to improve public health now when you have people like the overpoliticized idiots in Jefferson, GA: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/us/covid-georgia-schools-...

At Dartmouth they got to deal with coronavirus early on, someone who felt they didn't have to quarantine brought it from the Biogen outbreak. They have experience and the Dean of Students stated that Dartmouth is going to come down savagely on frat parties, the punishment being expulsion.

Expulsion from society sounds about right.

[hprotagonist]

problem is, expulsion from society sure sounds like “make a natural reservoir” to me...

[slowmovintarget]

What do we say? "Do better next time."

The real question is how do repair communication in our society. The author thought it was a hoax because they didn't trust anyone saying it was real.

Part of this is lack of exposure to other cultures, to people who travel. But a gigantic part is that the people we once turned to for learning what was going on in the world, sold their trust for political advantage. Now we have a collection of echo-chambers, each one every bit as partisan as the other, making each one useless for the social grounding function they used to serve.

So we tell the author, "Do better." But blaming someone who's been misled because "the other side" is usually untrustworthy (from their perspective) doesn't solve the larger societal problem. People like the author aren't "keen to drag us down". They're doing it because the source of information they had was poisoned.

I was able to get a crystal clear picture of what was going on and how we needed respond to it because I have family in China. Worse, I had people in my household visiting China when the lock-downs began. They spent the entire trip scared and apartment-bound. When they came home in early Feb. we all self-quarantined, thinking maybe it wouldn't come here if they could just shut the flights down.

But that is because we got the knowledge directly. News media was completely unreliable.

[dariusj18]

Back in the day we'd exile them to new frontiers. But now we don't have any frontiers left (and space will not be a frontier for a very very long time).

[Simulacra]

We do, but it's a less geographical method called "cancelling"

[Volundr]

I don't think "sorry for your loss" is too gentle. Frankly I think it's perfect. They've learned their lesson the hardest way possible, and their loss is no less real than someone who took it seriously the whole time.

The point of pushing the precautions so hard is to spare people the that pain, to spare THEM that pain. What's the point of withholding sympathy now?

[justSayin000001]

Maybe because their choices and actions didn’t just harm them, but others they came into contact with. When a person puts others lives and health at risk because they are an idiot then they don’t deserve sympathy. They got what they deserved.

[lol768]

You raise some very good points.

I don't think there's really anything that can be said at this point. It was an entirely preventable tragedy and the author (and his family) will have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

It's incredibly sad, but I really can't empathise with the mentality the author describes that lead up to blindly following Trump, rejecting "mainstream media" and all scientific evidence in favour of a dumb conspiracy theory.

I really don't get it.