What you accept and what you choose to spend your precious finite attention on are not the same thing.
If anything, what I suggest is the opposite of what you're saying. I do accept that some small fraction of people will do dumb shit, as they have through time immemorial. And, because I accept that, I feel no need to waste my time and emotional energy reading about it on social media and getting all outraged about it.
> And that's why we need enforcement.
Sure, but what we don't need is every social media site plastering pictures of people not wearing seatbelts with headlines like "Look at this horrid fucker not wearing their seatbelt! How can they be so thoughtless?!"
> Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone.
I fully understand the implications of non-compliance with social distancing measures. I don't agree with people who aren't doing it.
What I am saying is that it is not beneficial to crowd social media with stories of those people. After you read a Reddit thread about some selfish assholes partying up in Miami... then what? What is the action? I'm not going to personally fly to Miami and scold them. Me consuming that story has added nothing of value to my life, nor has it materially addressed the problem in any way.
All it does us make me feel angry and shitty. I've got enough bad feelings floating around because of, you know, the global pandemic. I don't need impotent manufactured outrage on top of that. What I and others need to get through the day are reminders of all of the good that people are doing.
And those same reminders are also a good way to encourage people to do what they're supposed to do. Do you want to live in a world where we teach people who to be by giving them heroes to aspire to, or by having the threat of public shaming and punishment looming over them 24/7?
When I read this sort of angry screed it scares me because it suggests to me that people are unstable, that behavior and reasoning can suddenly change due to switching contexts.
As a society we have accepted that a safe and responsible motorcycle operator should be allowed to do their thing, and that the freedom (and convenience) is worth the increased risk compared to a car.
Moreover, how much of an increased risk does a responsible motorcycle operator actually pose compared to a car operator, without other vehicles involved?
IMO you should be subject to serious and increased legal penalties for reckless driving (failing to signal, etc.) when a safely-operated motorcycle is nearby. And likewise for motorcyclists who speed down the highway threading between lanes should.
You're also not the first person on the Internet to bring up the motorcycle false equivalence as a counterargument to disease control methods like this. Not sure what to make of that.
it suggests to me that people are unstable, that behavior and reasoning can suddenly change due to switching contexts
This is pretty much true in my experience. You can look up a field called "behavioral economics" if you don't want to take my word for it.
angry screed
Why do I even bother? Is everything you disagree with an "angry screed"?
No. But my threshold may be lower than it used to be, because I'm worrying lately about how other people react to stress under current circumstances.
"As a society we have accepted that a safe and responsible motorcycle operator should be allowed to do their thing"
I'm not sure if you can really prove that "as a society we have accepted..." something, but assuming we have, my point was how arbitrary it is. We draw a little box around different things, and motorcycles only have to be safe relative to motorcycle norms, while cars have to be safe relative to car norms. And norms differ from country to country.
That doesn't mean I'm necessarily on a crusade to break down that sort of compartmentalization, I just alternately read people questioning it and people taking it for granted, so I tend to think of the other side either way.
You can make the same argument about seatbelts. The majority of people wear seatbelts because they've been asked to and they understand the danger of not wearing a seatbelt, for both themselves and their fellow passengers. But some fraction of people simply don't care, and well-intentioned people even have a tendency to say "oh just this one time." And that's why we need enforcement.
Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life.
Human life is not redundant. Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone. Just like seatbelts -- even if you don't personally care if you get severely injured in a car accident, the EMTs don't have the ability to just leave your selfish ass dying on the side of the road, even if you want them to. You just wasted a lot of other people's time, energy, and money as a result of your carelessness.
If you can take simple measures to prevent components from failing, you should, especially when component failure is an expensive and intrusive proposition, even if it doesn't mean the total failure of the system.
Not to mention the fact that humans are notoriously bad at making rational utility-maximizing decisions. People often only come to regret their actions only after they've been forced to face serious consequences for their actions. Yes, this is slightly paternalistic, but it's yet another argument in favor of enforcing quarantine-like laws with actual penalties.