There is also absolutely no way to tell that until you click into it.
"Rhetorical hyperbole" is a fancy way of saying "click bait."
Edit:
To be clear, I only read it because I was expecting a medical piece, not the usual whining about First World Problems where so many people don't know how to stop wringing their hands about our 24/7 news cycle (which isn't remotely unique to the current crisis) and then don't actually want reassurances that "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."
It was a waste of my time.
My father fought in WW2. My mother grew up in Germany during WW2 and its aftermath. The world has been on the brink before and come through it.
The same world that was all "Meh, not my problem" when I was homeless also doesn't want to hear "The world can, in fact, get through this." So I find it hugely personally grating to read this overwrought nonsense, frankly.
> The same world that was all "Meh, not my problem" when I was homeless also doesn't want to hear "The world can, in fact, get through this." So I find it hugely personally grating to read this overwrought nonsense, frankly.
I know this was somewhat of a rant, but I still found this statement thought provoking and it clicked with me.
It can be exhausting to deal with this type of neglect and self limitation at times.
Being consistently empathic and positive is challenging to say the least.
It's not a rant. It's a very restrained statement of fact.
Given how monstrously callous the world was to me when it was just my world in the toilet and on the brink and there were adequate resources for me to be helped but I couldn't access them because fuck me, no, I don't have any empathy for some privileged person who has remote work and a lot of protection from the pandemic whining about how they are back to checking the news constantly and, oh, there isn't even any good discussion anymore on effin Twitter.
And this makes the front page and then people have the gall to defend the click bait title.
Meanwhile, when I posted about actual solutions to help less privileged people try to access remote work during this crisis, it was dismissed as content marketing for the service I work for and sometimes write about.
I also spent some time criticizing the emphasis on ventilators and being attacked for talking about my firsthand experience with lung clearance techniques. Yesterday, I posted a piece about how some doctors are concerned with the 80 percent death rate for people on ventilators and trying to do other things, some of which are very similar to things I talked about. That got three upvotes and the only discussion was someone letting me know the link was broken and someone asking me how the pandemic is impacting the homeless population.
I'm downright disgusted with quite a lot of things. But I also know from being on HN for more than a decade that people here literally don't care if I'm in danger of dying and they certainly don't care about my feelings about the whiny oversensitive BS that very privileged people have ridiculously big feelings about because they are too fragile to face a real problem, good god.
But I also know from being on HN for more than a decade that people here literally don't care if I'm in danger of dying and they certainly don't care about my feelings about the whiny oversensitive BS that very privileged people have ridiculously big feelings about because they are too fragile to face a real problem, good god.
You seem happy to denigrate other people's problems as trivial compared to your own while at literally the same time you're complaining about the title of a link on HN. I hope you understand irony.
> (...) I don't have any empathy for some privileged person who has remote work and a lot of protection (...)
What I meant is that I think it is self-limiting to be pessimistic about our future in the way you described. I think we agree on this point. As you said here:
> The same world that was all "Meh, not my problem" when I was homeless also doesn't want to hear "The world can, in fact, get through this."
There are two underlying problems here: lack of empathy / neglect and pessimism.
Being optimistic, empathic and looking for solutions is challenging. It is far easier to self-loathe but also destructive.
> But I also know from being on HN for more than a decade that people here literally don't care if I'm in danger of dying and they certainly don't care about my feelings about the whiny oversensitive BS that very privileged people have ridiculously big feelings about because they are too fragile to face a real problem, good god.
It saddens me that you experienced this. In the other hand you seem to have developed an immunity against BS through this hardship. I think many people crave for this kind of clarity on some level, especially privileged ones. I don't mean this in a cynical way. I think there is a real, acute need for people to free themselves of self-induced BS problems.
It isn't meant to be, but it is written by the author with the understanding that it will be misconstrued until reading the article. As such it is written to bait the reader into clicking. Even if it also works as a metaphor, it seems bad taste.
How can you tell it's a metaphor without clicking through? Since this is a "novel" virus, I thought it would be about some heretofore unheard of symptom.
Thank you. Just as a meme is a non-physical analog of a gene, this "infection" is a non-physical analog of a virus. We talk about ideas going "viral" all the time and very few seem to mind. The metaphor is apt. This anxiety is contagious in the way that matters. Apparently some work it out by going online and dumping all over other people for no reason. I've seen it in other forums too, but nowhere as much as here.
On this note, i've noticed a surprising lack of any kind of personal stories or experiences being told about personally experiencing the consequences of this pandemic other than economic, being trapped in their home or the frustrations of pandemic life. The few people that have talked about having it, the NBA player comes to mind, have been criticised for talking about their experiences.
I've really yet to hear any actual accounts of anyone or their family being impacted directly by being sick. Which seems kind of odd for something that's supposedly ravaging the world horribly. With previous pandemics, the news loved to get the personal accounts of people. Every day there'd be new footage of hospital beds full of patients, stories about family members and their struggles etc. With this, nothing. Just some numbers being told every day, with no real verification as an excuse to enact some of the most fucked measures and legislation across the world.
For some reason it didn't even occur to me that the title might've been taken literally, but in hindsight that seems odd. I suppose if this is odd, the title can be considered clickbait.
The original title is "How Coronavirus Infected My Brain", and Hackernews stripped "how" (apparently [0] it does it automatically).
I think with "How" it definitely feels like a metaphor, not like a claim about some symptom (I'm not a native speaker though!)
In hindsight, I guess, I should have edited it straightaway, but thought it wasn't a big deal at the time of posting.
The "how" doesn't make as much difference as you imagine. That still sounds like "The exact medical pathway by which I acquired an honest to God brain infection." It really doesn't clear it up.
(I'm only replying because you say you aren't a native speaker. The word doesn't really add clarity in this case.)
"Slight difference" isn't very different from "it doesn't make as much difference as you imagine."
I'm not claiming it makes absolutely no difference to anyone ever.
I've been caught by the fact that HN strips out "how" at the start of a title, stopped and thought about it and, in most cases, concluded it didn't really add anything of value to the title.
The post is about anxiety causing them to slip into old bad habits, not about a brain infection.
It's really more like "How a global pandemic is affecting my mind and personal habits."