Friday, March 27, 2020

Goldilocks Zone

At National Review, Jim Geraghty observes something that he's seen on social media when it comes to discussions of COVID-19 and related matters. I'm not sure how well posts on their "Corner" blog track so in addition to linking I'll paste it here:

Social media is doing a terrific job of explaining a universal truth about the coronavirus. Anyone who is less worried than you are about they or their loved ones catching the coronavirus is naive, reckless, uninformed, oblivious, and/or only cares about the economy, money, and profit, and not human lives.

Anyone who is more worried than you are about they or their loved ones catching the coronavirus is paranoid, obsessive, neurotic, cannot understand risk or statistics, and/or only cares about abstract statistics “bending the curve,” and doesn’t care about lost jobs, lost businesses, and all of the misery and menaces to public health that come from the sudden onset of economic hardship.

Apparently there’s a really narrow window that is just the right amount of concern about the coronavirus.

2 comments:

Brian J. said...

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

-- George Carlin

Friar said...

I think that may have been in the back of Geraghty's mind when he made the observation. But it's oh so much truer in this instance.