Because it's not necessarily delusional, or paranoid.
Give them the benefit of the doubt: Assume they are competent, healthy adults, who really believe in what they say.
With that assumed, it's someone choosing to sacrifice other people's lives for their political values.
Personally I think that situation crosses the "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose" line.
We should certainly build systems that protect privacy if we can, to the extent we can. I'm very pro privacy, not against privacy at all.
But to the extent values conflict in a material situation, such as privacy versus not harming other people in a deadly way as the current crisis, we have to choose priorities, and then be smart and subtle about retaining as much of our overall values as we still can given the priorities.
> No, not just other peoples - that includes my own life too.
Yes, I agree, your own life is important too.
If you're not familiar with "your right to swing your fist ends at my nose", it refers to when your exercise of your personal freedom deprives another person of their personal freedom.
> The freedoms enshrined upon us by the constitution are not negotiable
And yet here you are, advocating depriving people of their freedom to live.
In the present case, your right to freely wander around, asymptomatically spreading COVID-19 contributes to depriving others of their freedom, by killing and disabling them.
The cold harsh reality of the biological world right now is that some freedoms exercised by a person are causally depriving other persons of those same freedoms.
You might not like that, but it appears to be the state of biological nature right now.
To assert that the freedoms enshrined by the constitution are "not negotiable" involves irony, denial and paradox: Because in exercising those freedoms, you yourself are taking them away from other people.
That's my argument and moral basis, anyway. The point is to persuade you to comply voluntarily due to compassion, whereby you ideally make the choice to do so out of consideration for the welfare of others in a situation where your actions affect others.
I've been stuck at home for a while now, so as to not kill another person staying with me. It's not like I enjoy being stuck at home.
I'll be mighty unhappy, and unimpressed by constitutional arguments, if they get killed or disabled because other people make an informed decision that their inalienable right to spread COVID-19 outweighs my person's inalienable right to life, liberty and dignity.
You do not have to persuade me to comply voluntarily. I already did.
I left NY for business 2 weeks ago. About 10 days ago, I started having faint symptoms. I was ready to go home. So I decided to start wearing a mask, and instead to drive straight to the secondary residence in the countryside as it is isolated. Due to the presence of elder relatives, I stayed in a nearby hotel room for 7 days - not even going out while I could have.
I had no laws forcing me to do that. But freedom does not mean people have no respect for other people's lives.
It may produce the same result, but there is a difference between forcing someone and letting them do the right thing by providing them truthful information. And freedom works both ways: that's also why I believe even sick people should not be forced to stay home just to protect me.
This is how in the US we often achieve better results than in other countries: more freedom!
The rise of authoritarianism for one small health crisis worries me just as much as it did on 9/11 for one minor attack. We reacted totally out of proportion, and let our feeling go in the way of reason. We permanently lost some freedoms, and ransacked the middle east (and we are still involved there almost 20 years later)
People die, it's a sad fact of life, and not a valuable reason to outweigh anyone inalienable right to life, liberty and dignity.
Yes, you chose "harming other people in a deadly way".
At which point other people's constitutionally enshrined freedom to defense of self and other kicks in, and they can detain you.
The constitution does not necessarily support your side in that situation, although it should support your right to be treated with dignity while detained, and to let you express your argument.
I sometimes don't get why some Americans worship the Constitution like that. It was written by humans Albeit educated, thoughtful people who greatly cared about it, but still more or less humans.
> No, not just other peoples - that includes my own life too.
Glad you don’t get to make that decision on behalf of other people, and those actions are at least illegal in California.
I also think it’s nonsense to imply you are putting yourself at any real risk, if you were immunocompromised or elderly you wouldn’t have such a callous attitude.
A well written constitution allows for provisions to be suspended and outweighed in a state of emergency. Ideally it has a mechanism for doing so where possible, and for limiting the effect and scrutinising it, treating such a state as a serious exception to the normal state of things.
Constitutions are a tool and an inspiration for better society. They are not able to anticipate or codify every situation, though. Ideally they themselves codify recognition of that, and govern how exceptions are to be handled with care.
> clubs and other private properties is off limits.
To give you the benefit of the doubt, you don’t mean that you refuse to have temporarily restricted movement during a pandemic?